


Nobody Learns

by SassafrassRex (Serbajean)



Series: Purchased, Traded, Wagered, Won [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Drunken Shenanigans, Galaxy Garrison, Gen, Humor, Malnutrition, Matt and Shiro's time at the garrison, Matt is a little Shit, Matt tries not to resent that, Matt's time at his work camp, Military School not!AU, Nepotism, Nightmares, Parkour, Personal growth and learning to love yourself!!!!, Pre-Kerberos Mission, Shiro is worse, Starvation, Violence, Voltron Gen Mini Bang 2017, cronyism, hero's journey deconstructed - sidekick's journey, non-linear, the garrison's great but it's far from perfect, urban climbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 02:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11636832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serbajean/pseuds/SassafrassRex
Summary: He knows there was a time, before he was at this camp.***Wiser people than Matt knew to steer clear of stars, dreamers, and all other fantasts.***It’s a pretty strange fate, that Matt played supporting cast in the story of his own life.***If they try and they win, you’ll hate them for how they leave you behind.If they try and they fail, you’ll hate yourself for having to tell them let go of their pipedreams.***“Could mean you need some better friends” – And Shiro has got to know how punchable his face gets whenever he grins like that.***Shiro’s got it in his head that he could be selected for the Kerberos mission.Matt wishes he would give it up now. Before he burns himself out.***Written for the Voltron Gen Mini Bang, with the wonderful artist, dylogger!!!Occurs in parallel toNo Greater HeavenandLong Nights Wondering, and in prequel toAll-Pervading Corruption





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This project has been quite the little trip. All my thanks to [dylogger,](https://dylogger.tumblr.com/) for being a total delight to work with. Super-chill, with some of best, most fun style ever (the things she does with colors have a well-documented tendency to make my insides curl up into happy squeeing).  
> For ALL the fantabulous art, see [here.](https://dylogger.tumblr.com/post/163697081049/)
> 
> Additional appreciation must go out to [in-a-garden-astonished,](https://in-a-garden-astonished.tumblr.com/) for giving me a _top-notch_ beta on this thing, in practically no time at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick thing: I have close family in every branch of the military (except the Coast Guard) BUT I, in particular, am not. Additionally, only one of them got there through an academy. SO, fyi to peeps with service connections, we're not _totally_ going All Aboard the Bullshit Train, but I have definitely taken some liberties.

 

 

 

“And the simulator? We don’t even _touch_ the simulator, until the second semester.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The _second half_ of second semester.”

“Mhmm.”

“Does that make _any_ sense?”

“Absolutely.”

The silence goes too long, and Matt tacks on a “– not” without even disrupting his flow of writing.

Shiro, suffice to say, has a few issues with the way the Garrison curriculum runs. Matt understands that, Matt respects that. Shiro is fairly gifted; it’s perfectly reasonable that he might take issue with the constraints imposed on him.

In turn, it is perfectly understandable for Matt to listen with approximately 40% of a single ear, while he spends the rest of his energy on the half-solved proofs in front of him.

Undeterred, Shiro pontificates about the problems with the pilot track’s Fighter Class. He kicks his foot out, whirling his computer chair in a (rather silly-looking, not that Matt’s noticed) manifestation of deep and abiding frustration.

Matt tries to pay attention, but without warning, a dam decides to open in his brain, his pencil starts scribbling. Perhaps Shiro laments how much _valuable experience_ he and his classmates are missing, but Matt only hears his own litany of _Shut up, shut up! Hold on, let me just—_ because he’s onto something, he’s on a roll, writing as fast as he can,  _he’s got it_ and he just has to jot it down before he _loses it._ Before his brain decides to trip over its own stupid self.

He needs to go see Dr. Montgomery. Cement all this in.

With that, Matt snaps his book shut and starts shoving things into his bag. Shiro is looking at him with an expression that fifty-fifty could either be Inquiry or Expectancy. Either he wants to know why Matt’s suddenly been replaced by a whirling dervish, or he’s waiting for a response to something he may or may not have just said.

 _Did_ he just say something? More simulator complaints?

Erring on the side of caution, Matt chirps, “Yeah, wow.” He tosses his bag over his shoulder. “That’s… Yeah. Yeah no, I mean. Shiro, that is so… true?” Matt shufflesteps backwards—“Yes. I’m totally onboard, you’ve got my support. I’m gonna want to hear all about it”—right out of the room.

Trotting down the hall, he calls back over his shoulder, “Know that I’m here for you!”

Shiro’s head pokes out the doorway, snorting as he mimes chucking his empty coffee cup after Matt’s back.

 

***

 

As far as Matt can recall, he met Shiro at a failed Movie Night, wherein they’d been the only two people to stick it out through _He Who Gets Slapped_ and _Brand Upon the Brain_ (others had perhaps done the wiser thing and cleared the hell out while the getting was good). Thus, what had ostensibly been a floor mixer degenerated to “Matt and Shiro, gorging on contraband snacks until Shiro falls asleep during _Secondhand Lions_.”

It wasn’t the most profound foundation for a friendship. Matt hadn’t much anticipated that Shiro would see him through five years of training, three failed relationships, sixty-seven exams, and hundreds of “this could get us expelled!”s, until the two of them went to face their eventual heat-deaths, somewhere out in space.

 

***

 

“Movies this weekend.” Matt had taken it upon himself to keep the tradition alive. Flush with initial optimism, he’d aimed for monthly. Then semimonthly. But to no surprise, life had a way of interfering. Sadly, this would be the first one in nearly a quarter, but Matt was still making a valiant effort. “I’ve got _Hundred Step Journey, Kelly’s Heroes,_ and _District B-19.”_

Hunched at his desk, Shiro’s head jerked up at the last one. “That right?”

Matt’s nod was careful, as he wracked his brain for some significance he was missing. As per usual, he had no idea what any of the films were about. They were the titles that came out of the hat; Matt didn’t make the rules.

He wasn’t sure why Shiro should care anyway, given his tendency to nod off halfway through.

Shiro’s smile widened in interest. But then it faltered, waning almost cartoonishly fast. His eyes dimmed a few lumens, and his face turned glum. In the manner of a dutiful kid being presented with the choice of chocolate or caster oil, he admitted, “Probably not. Don’t really have time.”

“Lame,” and Matt blew a raspberry. “Why not?”

“Studying. Well. Studying and everything else.” Shiro waved a hand. “I just have to get my CV out to Dr. Roe and Dr. Panjwani, with a few cover letters, so they can pass them along for me. I need to write up a plan to present at a meeting with Rossi. And you know, they just opened the application portal for that SCE clinic that’s happening in January. You know, to teach? So that’s probably going to be a few essays. Anderson wants names for–”

Matt listened to him rattle off the To-Do list. And, like any true friend would, Matt zoned out after Item 3.

He zoned back in around Item 11, if only to mentally remark at there even _being_ an Item 11.

The way Shiro had sacked out during _Secondhand Lions_ and every film since was making a lot more sense.

Matt flopped his legs over the side of his bed, letting his feet dangle. “So, I should just resign myself now, to never seeing your ugly face again?”

This wasn’t the first time Matt had asked, only for Shiro to be busy. And it wasn’t that Matt was hurt, per se (because hey, shut your fuck). But he was _curious_ , if purely for his own benefit. Matt was a contrarian. Matt was a smart who knew he was smart, and he really liked to argue. Much as he loved learning, he _never learned._ Matt was a _difficult_ sonuvabitch, and he didn’t have a large troupe of people he called friends. Shiro was one of few.

So, no. He wasn’t _hurt,_ he was just curious. He was… a vaguely disappointed shade of curious.

Because surely Shiro didn’t _need_ to be throwing himself at every opportunity under the sun. Did he? Yes, it was smart to be as involved as possible, that’s how the winners edged out the losers. But the pilot track (or any track) was a marathon, not a sprint. Shiro wouldn’t impress anyone if he ran every function on campus during Year 1, then burned out during Year 2.

Matt watched Shiro slump in his chair and sigh. Like a big, dramatic, “The jig is up” kind of sigh. Then he turned, hooking one elbow over his seatback. “You know… You know the mission set to leave in a few years?”

Matt wracked his brain. He knew hundreds, ships went to and fro every day. But anything important? Particular?

The only mission showing up on his radar was—

“The _Persephone_ ,” Shiro finished.

—was The Mission. The biggest deal in a decade, the _Persephone’s_ trip out to Pluto.

“What about it?”

“Well… I think I might want to fly it.”

Matt blinked.

And blinked again, because he’d just heard something that registered about as sensical as _The color purple is running for governor._

Sniggering, he pulled his feet back up and flipped around to lie on his front, chin in hands. “You uhm… yeah, you let me know how that works out for ya.”

Shiro glanced down. When he looked up, his smile sat crooked. “Well. _You_ want to go.”

“Yeah, and I’m banking on both nepotism and my being staggeringly overqualified to get me there.” Matt said it without a trace of shame. Because why would he? The race didn’t go to the swiftest, the wealth didn’t come to the wisest, _et cetera, et cetera._ Meritocracy was a cute idea, but Matt wanted to actually get his butt to Kerberos.

(Still. _Staggeringly overqualified_ was definitely on the To-Do list.)

He chuckled a bit. What a role model he would make, someday.

Matt realized Shiro wasn’t laughing along. Slowly, he looked up, to where Shiro’s face sat like a stone wall. And, like rusty, grinding gears, Matt’s brain slowly shifted from _the color purple_ , to _Shiro actually thinks he can go to Kerberos._  

“Wait, you’re serious?”

It was a door slamming, Shiro shut down. His arm came around across his chest, pseudo-casually hooking both wrists over his seatback to hide behind. Shrinking back a half-inch, shoulders rounding.

The narrowing of his eyes made Matt’s skin tingle. He could swear he felt himself being re-assessed. Perhaps recategorized from “Friend-shaped. Trustworthy,” to “Well maybe fuck you, too.”

It sent him scrambling to pull his foot back out of his mouth. “You _are_ serious,” trying to backtrack and salvage. “Well… Well, no, I mean. Cool, that’s…” What was he supposed to say? _Good for you. That’s great, you’ll kick ass, you got this_. No. No, Shiro would probably punch him in the face, if Matt fed him that.

Matt sat there, chin in his hands, mouth working like a landed fish. Trying to figure out how he could be a good friend, here.

 _You won’t manage it. You’re no one. It’s only first year, you’ll spend all your time working towards this. You’ll make yourself miserable for this, just for them to choose someone else. You’re my friend, I kind of don’t want you miserable. Don’t deliberately waste your time, ruining five years of your life, here._ This place was a marathon, not a sprint…

But Shiro had just straight-up declared intention to _sprint the entire marathon._

In the end, because guff was how he handled disquiet, Matt just sniffed and said, “Well, I’ll be here to collect your body.” His grin was awkward, but it was the best he had to offer.

He softened his focus, looking not at Shiro’s shuttered face, but at the wall behind him. It was plastered in images. Scenes from all over the globe, featuring the same handful of backpack-laden people, because Shiro was _exactly_  the kind of sap to hang up pictures. Without meaning to, Matt found himself staring at one, featuring Shiro, sandwiched between a guy who looked _astonishingly_ like him, and a younger girl who resembled them both. Behind the three, stretched a wide swath of sand dunes. 

Family. Matt wondered if Shiro’s siblings appreciated what idiot ideas their idiot brother wanted to inflict on himself.

Swear up and down, it wasn’t that Matt didn’t _believe_ in him—it wasn’t anything so personal. For his own part, Matt thought Shiro was pretty cool. Impressive even, as people went.

But Shiro had no chance in hell, that was just a fact. Shiro was the color purple, running for office. Fuck, who would ever give mankind’s most ambitious operation to date to _any_ pilot without 20 years experience under his belt? Shiro would have to eat straw and shit gold before they ever picked him. And yeah, Matt felt like an ass for thinking that, but that didn’t make it any less true.

He watched, waiting for Shiro to take it the wrong way and get hurt. Or take it the right way and swallow his pride. Ditch a genuinely bad idea before it made his life a mess.

But either Shiro was playing possum, or Matt had just wasted his time, talking to a brick wall. Shiro’s smile was non-committal, and his shrug said nothing. He saluted Matt with his stack of forms and just went back to his work.

Matt stared at the backs of Shiro’s hunched shoulders. Waiting for treppenwitz to set in and feeling terribly inadequate.

 

***

 

So, Shiro’s busyness was ungodly. Okay fine, Matt could appreciate that. But to be _so_ heinous as to completely cut him off from the social sphere?

Now, that sounded fake. Not to call his friend a liar but, Matt had some doubts— _nobody_  was that high-functioning without letting off steam here and there. Certainly not Shiro. He was hiding away an outlet of some kind, and Matt had a few working theories.

Some cadets de-stressed by running in the evenings. Either because they were just nuts like that, or because they wanted people to _think_ they were just nuts like that (not for Matt, thankyouverymuch. Waking up at 04:45, for brutal murder via PT was _quite_ enough).

Others (those with a superior grasp of good sense; Matt numbered himself first among this group) just opted to veg out as often as they could get away with.

But Matt suspected Shiro was neither of the above.

Because one innocuous morning, Matt found his 02:00 study-binge interrupted by Shiro sneaking back into their room. Matt’s first assumption was that a contentious bed partner must have kicked him out early. After all, _cadating_ meant shitting where you eat, and shitting where you eat tends to come with… hazards (it was true that _friends don’t let friends cadate._ But Shiro was a big kid, and Matt was his roommate not his mom).

But that hypothesis got dumped, once Matt took a closer look. In place of a half-buttoned uniform coat and backward pants, Shiro was sporting a beanie, cargos, and some wellworn five-fingers (actual five-fingers. In front of God and everyone, who told him that was okay?)

Fitting these various clues together, Matt’s brain regarded the finished picture and declared it  _Odd._

Blissfully unaware, Shiro offered a quietly cheerful “Hey,” before he began rifling around under the sink. Dark sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing both forearms to the dim light of the overhead lamp.

Fatigue made Matt’s eyes sting as he scrubbed at them, before looking again. Nope, he hadn’t imagined—Shiro’s arms looked like he’d mistaken a parking lot for a Slip ‘N Slide.

A soft “Ah-hah!” came from beneath the sink, and Shiro straightened up, rubbing alcohol in hand. Leaned over the basin, he proceeded to casually upend half the bottle over both arms, looking pretty damn cheerful for someone who’d been practically skinned, wrist to elbow.

When Matt asked what the hell, Shiro just shrugged innocently, claiming clumsiness. He’d been out walking, see.

At 2 in the morning.

And then he fell, see?

Something seemed fishy here, but under the haze of longing for sleep, Matt couldn’t point a finger to what.

“Was it on gravel?” he asked. “At high speed?” As his eyebrow made its ponderous, judgmental climb up his face, he had to press, “Cuz it kinda looks like you ate shit.”

Appropriately, Shiro’s grin was a rictus of shiteating enigma.

That particular evening ( _morning_ ), Matt waved it off and went to bed.

But the pattern continued. Another day, Matt asked him about the backs of his hands. Normal people, Matt thought, had a few scars on the backs of their hands. A _few_. Matt himself barely had any.

Shiro didn’t have scars, Shiro had _groupings_ of scars. The backs of his hands read like a topographical map of Wyoming. _This_ group of scrapes along his thumb. _That_ patch of pockmarks spreading from the base of his second and third fingers. Fresh, crusting scabs covered shiny pink scars, covered faint silver lines, _et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum_.

It was weird, okay? He could have been cage-fighting for all Matt knew.

Flummoxed and increasingly impatient, Matt eventually just decided to invite himself along on one of Shiro’s outings.

On the sly, of course.

It took a few tries and false-starts. But then one night:

The door shut. Matt held his breath and counted to thirty. Then he flung his blanket off, revealing a set of all-black civvies, and the chase was on.

—For about five minutes. Before it aborted into a tableau of one Matthew Holt, shivering in the cold and feeling rather foolish as he stood by a streetlamp and tried to figure whether his quarry had gone left or right.

The scene played out as one might predict. A hand clamped over his mouth, an arm jerked him out of the pooling light, and a voice muttered by his ear, “The hell you doing?”

Matt flailed like an old-time movie heroine, elbow nearly clocking Shiro in the eye, right under his beanie. Spinning out of the loose hold, “Me? You’re the weird one, here,” he gritted out, backing away to flatten his own ruffled feathers. “ _Who_ followed _whom,_  out into the middle of the night?”

Under the ocellated arrangement of streetlamps and shadows, Shiro suddenly looked nervous as hell.

Primly folding his arms, Matt awaited his explanation.

Though whatever he’d anticipated, it wasn’t for Shiro to— _well okay, but just hang on_ —open his mouth and start babbling— _hang on had Matt ever noticed the buildings around here?_

Matt blinked. The what?

Aside from to appreciate how well-suited they were to keeping rain off his head? No. He had not noticed the buildings.

But Shiro babbled on and Matt learned a few things.

Two weeks into class, Shiro had scaled the Malone building (well, that was news, but Matt remained carefully nonplussed). Shiro’s explanation of why was packed with words like “off-width,” “chimney,” “high foot,” “mantle,” “crimp,” and a host of other strange terms that Matt’s 67% sure Shiro just made up. Apparently, the thing was just  _begging_ someone to climb it, and Shiro had been weak.

It would not be the last time Shiro was weak.

Matt let this information flow over him like rain down a roof. However, his brain was still stuck on the part where he’d sneakily followed Shiro outside (at ass o’clock in the morning). _Just_ so that Shiro could turn around and start discussing architecture (as though this were a reasonable thing to discuss, _at ass o’clock in the morning_ ).

Matt turned an assessing eye up at the nearest building. Brickwork. Moulding. An artfully bumpy facade. He tilted his head sideways, in case a portal to Climber Narnia might magically appear.

Nope. Still just a building.

Matt sighed. His mother warned him he’d meet strange people at school.

He supposed he could understand it, in an abstract sense at the least. Kids liked jungle-gyms, some people didn’t outgrow that. But a primordial desire to brachiate hardly seemed like adequate reason to get up at zero-dark and risk landing ass-deep in trouble. And, _speaking of landing,_ “Maybe this is a stupid question,” he started.

Shiro’s encouraging nod looked both earnest and a little deranged. Matt took a discrete step backwards.

“Say that you… you know, just for the sake of argument… _fall._ ” What would happen then?

Shiro’s grin collapsed into an eyeroll, “Tsh. They’re not _that_ interesting.” Then apropos of nothing, he snapped his fingers and piped up, “Hey, how long can you hang?”

“ _Interest-_ wait, what?”

“Hang.” There was the smile again. In the years to come, an older, wiser Matt would know that smile meant trouble. “Like, from a fingerjam.”

“Fingerj- that’s not a thing.”

Shiro looked down. “I think your shoes are probably good enough.”

“I mean. They’re not slippers?”

“You know what off-width is?”

“You start speaking English, _right now,_ ” Matt jabbed a finger at the ground, “Or I’m ratting your ass out.”

“Are not.”

Shiro ought to know better than to make it a challenge. Matt planted his hands on his hips (unconsciously doing a bang-up of impersonation of his mother). “Try me.”

Recognizing the better part of valor, Shiro raised both hands, belatedly backing off. “Okay, never mind. Sorry. Got it, you’re not interested.”

And the fucker actually turned around to leave! “Fucking—hey! _Hey!_ ” Matt ran around to stand in front of him. “‘Scuse you, you were telling me why I’m not.”

As roadblocks went, Matt wasn’t a very big one, but good manners made Shiro stop anyway. “It… Wait, seriously?” He cocked his head to the side.

Matt was both tired and freezing. And feeling a smidge vindictive. So, “ _Yes,_ seriously.”

“Uhm,” Shiro tried. “‘S a dick thing to do?” Like he was fielding a riddle. “I’m not sure I understand your question. But you aren’t the dickish type, so why don’t you just come on?” And stepping around Matt, he resumed his happy rule-breaking.

Righteously indignant, “The hell I’m not!” Matt jogged after him. “I have it in me to be _profoundly_ dickish, you don’t even _know._ ”

“Uh-huh.” Shiro seemed unconvinced. “How are you at pull-ups?”

“Eh.”

“’Eh?’”

“Yes, _eh._  I get through PT fine.”

“Okay.” Never breaking stride, Shiro glanced around. “We can switch to a different one then.”

“What?”

“A different building.” Shiro stopped and spun around so fast, Matt bumped right into him. “An easier one. You _are_ coming along, right?”

Matt rubbed his stinging nose, seriously contemplating his choice of best friend. He paused for a second. “If I ask what a fingerjam is, will you explain? Or just smirk in a superior fashion and beckon me onward?”

“Yes.” Shiro definitely smirked, flapping his forearm in an unmistakable _c’mon._

 

***

 

Everyone did PT in the mornings. Matt fell under the heading of _everyone_ , so it wasn’t like he was a noodle. And Shiro said this building wasn’t exactly difficult.

Still, something in Matt’s brain maintained that this was recklessness of the highest order. Matt was halfway up the Rushdie building, plastered to the outside (the _wrong side_ ) of the wall. The hell was he thinking? Eight floors wasn’t that tall, but it was plenty tall enough to splatter Matt across the pavement. Even that aside, what if he was _caught?_ At best, Kerberos would be off the table. At worst? Who knew.

But instead of freaking him out, the stress just zeroed him in. He felt focused (because his hindbrain knew distractions were lethal). Aware and astute (that would be his norm, until he was safely back on the ground). Calm, even (despite how he heard his pulse pounding in his ears). Just. Awake.

He felt wide awake.

Matt had never considered himself an adrenaline junkie. But he was breathing and he was moving. Moving, moving, and _moving,_ instead of thinking too much on any of it.

Partway up the building, the design shifted. The base, which heretofore had been an easy facade, with plenty of handholds, suddenly split into two broad towers. Vertical ridges ran up the sides, with windows systematically marking every floor all the way to the top. The windows jutted outward, creating nooks, for the desks inside.

Which Matt realized, would be his and Shiro’s way up. _Chimney,_ he realized with a smile. If he put himself between the window frames, one on the left and one on the right, then it made a chimney. Around four feet wide, almost four feet deep.

It may have been Matt’s first urban climbing adventure, but even _he_ could handle a chimney. He'd been to summer camp, after all.

At the base, there was a lip, wide enough for both of them to stand without it being too precarious. There they paused, to catch their breath, before Shiro led them on.

He had just started climbing again, wedging himself upwards, and he wasn’t even a foot above Matt when—

“Shit, c’mere!”

Shiro’s hand closed on Matt’s shirt collar, even as Matt was already whirling around to force himself into the gap. The tight space brought his nose _all_ up close and personal with the outside of Shiro’s knee. Which was perhaps semi-awkward, but not something to prioritize.

Suddenly confronted with the real prospect of getting caught, Matt turned a bit giddy. _Don’t look up,_ came his silent prayer. He could almost hear the boots on the ground far below, and he bit his lip to keep from sniggering. Next to his face, he felt the slight trembling of Shiro’s knee, as it strained to maintain its owner’s mid-climb freeze. _Don’t look up. We’re not even here._

They were playing without a safety-net, weren’t they? Matt hadn’t lived this much in months. No, he’d just been keeping his nose to the grindstone, making himself miserable. But here…

Yup. Definitely giddy. There was confusion, adrenaline, _he’d never done this before,_ and he felt like he might tip backwards and fall up. He focused on his hands, pressed against the rough walls. He focused on his face, squashed against synthetic cargos. He let that be his ground line, for all this excess energy (and where was it all even coming from?)

Despite his best efforts, he snorted out a giggle.

“Shhh,” and Shiro’s knee jerked in a reprimand, wafting the smell of sweat and detergent up Matt’s nose.

Matt held himself perfectly still for another few seconds. A very, very long few seconds, before Shiro breathed out. “Okay, they’re gone.”

Matt let out an overdramatic “Phew,” and tilted his head up. Feeling cheeky, he plopped his chin against Shiro’s IT band, eyes tracking up the outside line of leg to hip to shoulde to shadowy, downturned face.

Matt’s timing was perfect. In a gross way. His gaze locked with Shiro’s, _just_ as a drop of sweat chose that very second, to roll to the tip of Shiro’s bangs and make its bid for freedom.

It dropped down, down, landing smack dab in Matt’s left eye.

“Ack, shit.” Matt scrunched up his face and scrubbed against the sting. “Thanks for that.”

An amused huff sounded above his head, sneaking out from under Shiro’s stupid stringy hair. Matt elbowed the back of his knee—

 _Carefully,_ though. _Carefully,_  he elbowed it, because if Shiro fell into him, they would both be dying tonight and just thinking that should have sobered Matt up.

But the pain in his eye must have been triggering the wrong neuron, because up from his throat burbled a girly, high-pitched twittering he was powerless to stop.

Clapping a hand over his mouth did nothing to muffle the sound. His mortification made Shiro chuckle (a deep, _manful_ chuckle, the jackass) and shake his head.

Matt didn’t even have the wherewithal to maintain his embarrassment. He was too tired. Or maybe too pepped about not yet falling to his death. Maybe he was just that good-natured. Maybe he was too nervous about the prospect of explaining why he (please, Sir) didn’t deserve disciplinary action for the crime of following a crazy person up the outside of a building. Such a litany of _or maybes_.

Turning and readjusting his hands, Shiro went right back to his climbing, easy-as-you-please. Feet still positioned like he was doing lunges, he hiked himself up the inside of the chimney, making the whole process look stepwise and practiced, which, like as not, it was.

Every single time during PT, Matt reaffirmed that he hated doing lunges. But for some reason, though lactic acid burned as badly as it ever had, he couldn’t stop grinning.

 

***

 

Reaching the top was akin to seeing God.

If only in the sense that Matt was pretty sure he had died, somewhere along the line.

He stood on wobbly legs, wondering for the umpteenth time just _what_ had possessed him to do this? Every muscle he had was aching. Every single one, he would swear to it.

Beside him, Shiro scrubbed his hand through his hair, shaking his head like a dog. Sweat droplets literally flew everywhere, some actually landing on Matt and _what_ barn was Shiro _raised_ in?

Not that Matt wasn’t drenched, himself. No surprise, that had been hard work. The last stretch had basically just been serial pull-ups. One right after the other and Matt’s arms were _shaking._ He could probably wring his own shirt out and have a puddle. Though at least _he_ wasn’t _splashing_ people with it, so that put him ahead of present company. 

Matt flopped down, legs just sort of nope-ing out for the moment. A water bag appeared in front of his face, which he swiped without preamble. Drinking took an undue amount of focus. His body couldn’t decide whether it needed to gulp down water or gasp another breath of air.

Shiro stole it back before he was finished. The motion spilled water down Matt’s front and, like everything else, Shiro laughed at him for it.

And then Matt was laughing too. Once again, it bubbled upward without his consent. Because hey, that was legitimately kind of scary. Fuck, but it was. If they were caught? Shit, if he’d _fallen?_

Matt’s arms and shoulders (and legs and _everything_ ) were burning. Shaking with both adrenaline and overexertion. His stomach was cramped from drinking too fast. It was the middle of the night, he had PT in the morning, where he knew he was going to just _die_. He was nauseous as all hell, his water was considering a reappearance, and he was still breathing hard enough it bobbed his head up and down.

He felt _great._

He scrambled up on numb legs, only to promptly roll his foot and go tumbling. Reaching out, he caught himself against the guard wall that limned the roof. The top edge got him right under the sternum to jerk him to a halt and Matt’s gaze pointed down, down to the ground. Awash in wide-eyed incredulity, he snorted out more of that inelegant giggling.

 _Look where we are,_ he thought. _Shit,_ look _where we_ are _._

_Look what we did._

 

“Right?” came from behind him. Had Matt said that out loud? He could have, he could have screamed it.

He turned to see Shiro, stuffing things back into his camelback. Where Matt was clinging to the wall to stay upright, Shiro was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. His breath wouldn’t have blown out a candle; he looked ready to climb another.

Show-off.

“Show-off.”

“‘Show-off?’ Me?” And without further ado, Shiro put both hands atop the wall and dug in with his fingers, popping up into a planche, right there on the edge. His feet tilted up above his head and Matt’s heart plunged to see Shiro tip ominously towards empty space.

Of course, it needn’t have. Shiro’s feet came to a halt above him. Shy of a handstand, though more difficult by far.

Which he then held.

Matt rolled his eyes, “You’re right, that’s way worse.”

“Hehe,” Shiro’s voice came out strained, breath billowing in and out of his nose, “Twig.”

The roof was covered in a layer of gravel and Matt wasn’t shy about lobbing a handful at him. Under the barrage, Shiro laughed out a yelp and the gravel made a _plinking_ noise as it tumbled back to the roof. Most fell over the edge to the ground below, Matt cringed for any midnight stroll-takers.

Settling down with his back to the wall, Matt reached for the camelback, to retrieve the water again. “So, you did gymnastics or something?”

“You kidding?” Shiro punctuated the scorn by tipping back down onto his feet. He was trying to pretend like his arms hadn’t been shaking, but Matt saw. “Hell no. All gymnastics is good for is teaching people the wrong way to roll and the worst way to land on their feet.”

Matt listened, water hovering halfway to his open mouth. “Ya know,” he sipped his drink, then set the bag down. “I’ve heard there’s a stereotype somewhere. About freerunners, and their dickishness. Can’t imagine where that got its start.”

“No idea.” Shiro smiled amicably, “Myth? Probably perpetuated by gymnasts?”

Matt squinted. “My sister does gymnastics, just saying. Or she did, anyway.”

“I’m glad she got out.” Amicably became _amicably shiteating._ “Wouldn’t want her needing double knee replacements before she hit forty.”

Matt snorted. “You’re a dick.” And a troll.

“I am, yeah.”

 

***

 

A measly three-and-some hours later, Matt woke up to the feeling of his body informing him that _yeah no,_  it didn't forgive him for this.

Exactly forty-five minutes before the morning call, something was shaking his shoulder. “C’mon.” And he heard Shiro’s voice, “Hey. Up we get, Sunflower. Time to go.”

Dear _God_ , Matt was in such pain. “Die in a fire,” he slurred.

He heard Shiro snigger, “Yeah, probably someday.”

Send help, Shiro thought he was funny. Matt groaned, thinking _someday_ couldn’t come soon enough.

Rather than leave him alone (to sleep off the _unimaginable torment_ he would incur upon moving), Shiro started tapping his finger against Matt’s head, repetitive like a woodpecker.

 _Utter. Bastard._ Matt’s eyes finally opened to the disgusting sight of one Takashi Shirogane. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, near-bouncing in place like he’d already had his coffee.

Matt struggled to think of something bad enough. _Fuck eight generations of your ancestors,_ was too prosaic. And his brain wasn’t quite up to the task of assembling any clever combinations of “crotch-pheasant” and “donkey-fucker.” There had to be _some_ words in the English language for to describe the depths of his utter contempt, but he couldn’t find them. If there was justice in the world, his glare would sting enough.

On the way down, Matt’s entire body was one merry song of pain. He contemplated ambicide no less than seven times.

He didn’t crack a single smile until 21:00, when he collapsed on his bed.

 

***

 

Two days later, Shiro asked him if he wanted to go again.

The politest way to put it, would be to say that Matt declined. _Pilots,_ he thought to himself. Crazyass adrenaline junkies, how had Matt not noticed that before?

So, Shiro went without him.

He asked again, a few days later, “Mazurek building, you interested?”

Matt simply shook his head with a laugh, “You’re just insane. I get it now.”

He held out for four more days. But when Shiro strolled in, asking for the third time? Matt _leapt._

__

 

***

 

As is so often the case in life, they’d needed something from each other. Year one Shiro was an obnoxiously high-octane, sometimes-jackass, who’d needed to force a whole lot less. Year one Matt? A preternaturally standoffish borderline-wallflower, who’d needed to give a whole lot more. With the mellowing influence of years (and Matt), Shiro had come to rein himself in. With the enlivening influence of years (and Shiro), Matt had begun to put himself out.

That’s a gross oversimplification, but it isn’t particularly inaccurate.

When Matt’s feeling bitter, he thinks about how he was basically the sidekick of his own life.

When Matt’s feeling appreciative, he thinks about how much better a person he became, because he’d had Shiro to push him.

Matt’s usually much too tired to think either of those things. But when he remembers the Garrison, and all the times Shiro asked him climbing but he was too busy, too tired. Or asked him drinking, or any of the other crap they got up to—

He thinks of these things. And he wonders why he didn’t just say _yes,_ every single time?

Why?

Why didn't he always say yes?

“Who are you looking for?”

Matt looks away from the holo, turning instead to Sava. She digs at her food, mashing a handful together into a sticky lump that she deftly brings to her mouth. Matt watches with a gnawing sort of jealousy, even though there’s a dish of the same glop right in front of him. With her one arm occupied, Sava points her other, tipped in a long pincer, back up towards the holo projected above them. Currently, it displays an arena match that’s just getting started.

She speaks around her mouthful, “Every time we’re here. Every day. You stare at that, for a few ticks. Like it’s the most important thing. But then you look away, and you never look back at it again.” She blinks her eyes, one after another after another. “You're searching for someone? Who is it that you’re seeking and not finding?”

Beside her, Ranoc lifts his head, suddenly interested. Like Matt, his eyes number two, and Matt’s fairly decent at reading them, though he used to find the yellow coloration more than a little off-putting.

Under the weight of their attention, Matt turns down towards his food. “’M looking for a friend.”

His mumble is too quiet, so Sava reaches over and uses her pincer to pull Matt in closer. The thing is big enough that it fits around his entire head. Ranoc snorts into his food, lightly rubbing a fond hand between Sava’s shoulders.

“Ow,” Matt grumbles. “Ow _ow_ , a friend! I’m looking for a friend of mine; I used to know someone!” He slaps at her with smaller, ineffectual strikes she barely feels. “Let go!”

Her pincer opens and she sits back. She gently bumps her arm against Ranoc’s, though the entirety of her gaze remains on Matt.

“One of the gladiators?” Ranoc pipes up. “You knew one of the gladiators?”

“Yeah. I’d try to watch him, here.” Matt gives a bit of a shrug, and “Champion,” he provides, before either can ask.

Ranoc chokes. Two of Sava’s eyes widen, the other six engage in a complicated sequence of rapidfire blinking. “Are you lying?”

“Nope.”

She looks at him, suddenly analytical. “Can you fight, too?” But she shakes her head before he can say anything. “No. No, it’s your leg. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? And not there. But I didn’t know your species could fight at all.”

Matt nods down at his dish. Shame pools in his gut in place of food, while he lets them draw their own conclusions. He mushes a lump of the paste together and shoves it into his mouth. It tastes like… nothing. It tastes like texture.

But the feeling of chewing, swallowing, having _something_ in his belly is nothing short of glorious, and Matt tries hard to savor it. He’s always so hungry. However he tries, his food is always gone inside a handful of ticks; he can never make it last.

To distract from eating, he looks down at the backs of his hands, and traces a gooey finger along the fading scars that used to make his skin look like a topographical map. Souvenirs from times Matt had hung from a fistjam or a fingerjam, laughing in sheer wonderment as the maneuver held his weight and he never fell (just like Shiro said he wouldn’t).

Through layers of dirt, he can barely see them. They’re fading, like everything else the Garrison gave to him. Draining away, and Matt has different scars now.

Sava glances up at the holo, where a voraq is ripping into a pair of x’otol. “You watch for him? He hasn’t been in any fights for some time, now.”

Matt chews his glop.

“He is probably dead.” Ranoc looks passing regretful of it, and Sava nods her head with him.

It’s still possible that he isn’t. Shiro. The only fights that get shown here are the ones that the emperor attends. Plenty of others exist. Not to mention, the holo plays in the camp all day long, not just during Matt’s meal shift. Champion might still be there. It could be that Matt’s missed seeing him because of poor timing.

Very, very persistent poor timing. Still, it’s more hope than he has of seeing anyone _else_ he’s lost. 

“You know that, don’t you?” Sava asks. Frank and honest, in a way that she probably thinks is comforting.

Matt nods. “Yeah. He’s dead.” Probably died fighting a nobody. Or picked up an infection. Or pissed off a guard. Or, or, or.

Shiro’s gone. Just like Dad’s gone. And Matt too, one of these days.

When he’s cleaned every last morsel off his dish, he waits for the call, to go back to work.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_Hi there, youngin’!_

_Congrats on_ **_surviving your plebe summer_ ** _AND, if my calender’s right, finishing your_ **_first round of exams!_ **

_This is Matt, your Year 2 mentor. Here to guide you through your first year’s perilousness, and to fortify you with study tips, professor Who’s Who, and all sorts of other treasures._

_Hit me with some times you’re good to meet up. Lunch is always great, but I’ve got free Tues/Thurs evenings._

_Keep up, keep well,_

_Matt_

As he sent it out, he leaned back in his chair, trying not to feel like a loser about how long he’d agonized over how formal to be (or not be). His little MiniMe was one Cadet Garrett. Matt knew exactly nothing about him, and as he returned to studying his imaging charts, he found himself kind of anxious about hearing back.

He was still waiting a few hours later, when the sound of their door bouncing off the wall announced Shiro was home. Matt turned in his chair, just in time to see him _flurmph_ through the doorway, and _mrrph_ face-down onto his bed.

“Went that well, huh?” Unlike Matt, Shiro had gone the route of just showing up and actually _meeting_ his kiddo, first thing.

“Mrrghmph.”

Matt jimmied his pinky around in his ear. “Hmm? Think you’re a few vowels short of a marriage proposal, there.”

“Gmmph.” Shiro continued to mumble incoherently, until Matt gave up and lobbed a hardcover at him.

 _All My Friends are Dead_ landed, sharp corner down, on Shiro’s back. Bouncing merrily, it came to rest by his hip, atop the newly-rumpled blanket (a more poignant commentary on the pitiable, Matt never saw).

Shiro’s head popped up from where he’d been trying to suffocate in his comforter. “Welp,” he tucked one hand under his chin, stretching the other behind him, to grope around for the book. “It’s entirely possible that he hates me.”

 _You were yourself again, huh?_ —was what Matt did not say, for the sake of preserving good feelings. Instead, he offered, “Suppose I’ll be canceling the 42 doves, then?”

Shiro let out a snort. “Tragically enough.” His fumbling finally hit paydirt, and he un-contorted himself, book in hand.

“I’ll crack him,” he muttered, settling down to kill two minutes, beginning with the tragic plight of the dinosaurs.

 

***

 

Matt’s mentee turned out to be a godsend, in that he needed practically nothing. He met Matt’s half-assed mentoring with some equally half-assed mentee-ing; they never even met in person, which was its own source of hilarity, since they probably lived in neighboring buildings. They  _tried_ to meet. More than once, but it fell through and then fell through again, before a mutual agreement of  _eh fuck it,_ wordlessly passed between them.

Cadet Garrett seemed like a sweet kid. But well-grounded, though—he knew _exactly_ what he was here to do. Aside from that? Well, he had some strong opinions on cooking. And, with the passage of time, he surprised Matt more than once, dropping some out-of-left-field good advice, when Matt hadn’t even (deliberately) let slip that he needed it.

The one thing—the only worry he noticed—was that Garrett was timid. Noticeably timid, enough so that Matt could have picked up on it from email exchanges, alone. But on top of that, there were a couple times Matt got CCed in notices about Garrett and instances of anxiety, and it did make him wonder just a little.

But for the three main field tracks—pilot, engineer, comms officer—the Garrison didn’t admit anyone on medications (for the obvious reason: once they had field assignments, the Garrison couldn’t guarantee _access_ to those medications. Things went FUBAR, timetables fell apart, supplies ran short, and someone could run out of meds that they needed). So, if only based on that, Matt figured it couldn’t be _too_ serious, could it? He just… wondered on occasion. And he tried to throw in a supportive comment when he remembered.

But that was perhaps his only concern. From all Matt could see, Cadet Garrett had his shit pretty well in order. _Impressively_ well in order. And though he’d had nothing to do with it, Matt felt rather proud. Safe to say that Matt the Mentor was kind of superfluous, here.

Which was definitely nice. Matt had _more_ than enough work to do, without also hand-rearing a baby plebe. Instead, their relationship evolved into something more akin to occasional penpals, than anything else. Garrett regaled him with stories of his own roommate’s antics (crazy kid from the Caribbean, on a perma-sugar high). Matt laughed his ass off, then responded with a tale of his and Shiro’s latest dipshittery, along with an emphatic _Dude, I_ **_understand._ **

Speaking of dipshittery, _Shiro_ —and Matt figured that thought sequence deserved a laugh—appeared to be mopping up all the bad luck Matt had dodged.

Someone must have noted his obnoxious tendency to overperform (served him right; hadn’t Shiro _wanted_ to be noticed?) and had saddled him with a bit of a problem child. Because while Matt’s mentee was made out of sugar and wonderfulness, Shiro’s was…

Well, he came prepackaged with some hang-ups. And some discipline problems. And some dumb ideas. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly _terrible_ about Cadet Kogane, at least not that Matt saw, though Shiro would be a better person to ask. He just had some shit he carried, same as anyone else. His _problem_ seemed to stem from how… clumsy he was with it. How unpolished.

He fought where he could be seen. He acted out and _got caught._ He back-talked, and he did it at the wrong people. By Matt’s estimate, he wasn’t too complicated a picture—an unfinished ball of grouchy young adult, with lousy coping methods and trouble focusing. And to be fair, his craziness was going to make him a _perfect_ fit for the nuthouse pilot track. Nothing short of perfect, and the fact that he was talented as hell wouldn’t hurt him either. Kogane would be golden, once he figured out some boundaries.

Just… Shiro was having trouble trying to convince him of that.

From his safe distance, Matt found it quietly hilarious. Each time Shiro face-flopped down on his bed, muttering things like “reckless,” and “short-sighted,” about a certain youthful “pig-headed idiot,” it became a mighty struggle for Matt to keep a straight face. But keep it, he did. Many an evening saw Shiro bitch about how Kogane wouldn’t know good sense if it walked up and started jerking him off, but Matt (“Uh, do you _often_ think about jerking Cade- _ow!_ ”) stuck around through it all. Nodding in solidarity like a good friend, while trying really hard not to look like he was penning yet another painless missive to Cadet Garrett.

(But if Matt was so full of shit it was turning his eyes brown, could he really be blamed?)

Still, with that being said? And if Matt was being honest? And if Shiro was definitely nowhere in earshot? Then Matt might say he found Shiro’s persistence kind of admirable. Genuinely, cross his heart. He was pretty sure the Shiro he’d first met during Year 1 would have taken one look at Kogane and said, “No, thank you; frankly, I don’t hate myself that much.”

Of course, Year 1 Matt would have likely taken his and Garrett’s missed first meeting as a cosmic cue that they should Never Speak Again. And then where would things be?

When Matt had enough downtime to sit and contemplate it, he was kind of proud. He liked to think he was progressing on schedule.

 

***

 

“Wait, hold on,” Matt let his book fall open on his desk, staring instead at the approval form he’d grabbed up. It had six revisions and resubmissions on it, along with Shiro’s name, indicating—“Wait, you’re doing research with him, too? _Both of them?_ ”  Matt’s eyes bugged out. Damn. And that was to say nothing of the fact that both instructors had their own semi-annual clinics which, hey, guess which lucky overachiever would now be teaching those? “God, why?” How much _did_ Shiro hate himself?

Years 2 and 3 were not like Year 1. In hindsight, Matt wanted to weep over how much free time he used to _waste_ back when he’d been a new plebe, young and well-rested and so _stupidly ungrateful_. Years 2 and 3 were hell on toast; why the fuck Shiro wanted to pile extra work on his plate, God only knew.

Tired gray eyes peered up at Matt over a pile of books. Shiro squinted like a half-woke vampire. Pinched and drawn, perhaps too befuddled to tackle the art of transmogrifying Thoughts into Words… 

“Blood for the blood god,” he finally settled, hunching back over his work like a 300-year-old librarian.

 _CVs for the skull throne._ Matt nodded slowly. That was a fair point. That was an extremely fair point. You could blindfold that point and hand it some scales.

It was fair enough to give Matt pause. _He_ wasn’t working with officers. _He_ didn’t have half the teaching and involvement and other such bullshit that Shiro did.

But then, Shiro didn’t have a dad on selections, did he?

Matt never liked dwelling on that line of thought. At one point his father had had to sit him down for a “So, you really want to do this?” talk, and when they hit upon the inevitable topic of nepotism, Matt had squirmed like he was being held over hot coals.

He hated thinking of it. He wanted to go, couldn’t they just let him apply on his own, the same as anyone else?

Since the answer to that question was a resounding _no, they could not,_ Matt had to be smart about this. Speaking realistically, the presence of his father could work for Matt, or it could work against him. There were people on that committee who would readily vote him down, just because of his relation to Commander Holt.  

Others, though? Well, the Garrison wasn’t progressive enough that the _Good Ole Boy_ system had been eradicated. It would be stupid to ignore that.

 _Maybe_ Matt didn’t need to try as hard, or _maybe_ he needed to try even harder? So many _maybes._  With no way to know for sure, it was better to err on the safe side. And just make his application shine like a thousand suns, so they didn’t even _think_ about turning him away.

So then, did that mean he should be doing more? More research, more involvement, with more people? Shiro would probably have his name on twice the honors than Matt would. Maybe—

Matt put the kibosh on that whole train of thought. Down that road lay madness and second-guessing. Matt had a plan. He’d already had this talk with himself. Multiple times. He had a plan. It was a good plan.

So, stick to the plan (and let Shiro stick to his).

Matt picked up his book and got back to work.

 

***

 

And thus, it progressed. Rising to the occasion, only for the bar to rise higher. Working their asses off, then obnoxiously pretending it all came easy for them. _Schmoozing._

Matt hated schmoozing. The plight of the introvert, he hated everything about it.

Shiro, however, was a people-person.

No, that made it sound too much like a compliment. When it came to faculty and officers, Shiro was a shark. All that _joie de vivre_ that made him so affable got turned around and weaponized. And he morphed into some kind of attention-hogging, ego-stroking, charismatic sonuvabitch; the bastard oozed charm out his eyeballs. And always knew _just_ the right thing to say, in order to (subtly, unassumingly ( _constantly!_ )) remind everyone of just how great he was.

Matt hated him a little bit.

And shamelessly piggybacked off him, wherever possible. Shiro’s own fault for making it look so easy.

As systems went, theirs wasn’t so bad. Lip-service was a necessary evil, but it got done. _All_ the work eventually got done, and everybody went home a winner.

 

***

 

Matt opened bleary eyes, wondering what time it was.

He blinked. Half-lit shapes became a person. He thought he saw someone hunched by Shiro’s computer.

Blue screenlight, pooling between shaking shoulders. Shiro’s face, shuddering against folded hands.

Matt opened his mouth, thinking he should inform Shiro there was a mopey Shiro, crying at his desk.

Or. Wait

Wait, that didn’t

Matt fell back asleep.

 

_***_

 

Not everyone else seemed to appreciate it, but Shiro was friggin gross.

See, Matt made the mistake, once, of doing him a favor. Early one morning, he heated up some pasta he’d pilfered from a meeting with Montgomery. It was some kind of eggplant tomato wonderfullness, head and shoulders above the crap the mess hall served.

Heating it up, he ate half for breakfast, then left the pot out where Shiro could see it, with a quick message to help himself.

But at noon, the pot was still there, untouched. Odd. But then, Shiro could be oblivious sometimes. Matt hadn’t checked that morning, whether the blanket lump on Shiro’s bed had actually contained a Shiro or not. Maybe he hadn’t been here at all.

Matt considered throwing the pasta away, but he was in rush, so he left it instead.

He got in late that evening, and the pot didn’t even register.

He woke up the next morning, to the sound of whistling. Specifically, his errant roommate’s whistling. Cheerful, satisfied, the kind of good mood that defied reason. Fumbling around for his alarm, Matt’s heart sank. Wake-up wasn’t for another thirty minutes, the fuck was Shiro whistling for? Their room was a shoebox, he couldn’t be a little quieter?

Matt pulled a deep breath in, scrubbing a hand over his face. “You sleep with somebody last night?”

“Hm?” The noise ceased. “Last night? ‘Fraid not.”

Matt sat himself up. “Then quit your fucking whistling.”

Shiro gave a quick bark of a laugh, but at least the tune went away. Matt squinted around the dim room. Readying himself to face the day, when he spotted something nauseating.

“Shiro,” he sighed. “What are you doing?”

“Hm?” Shiro looked down at his breakfast. “Note said you left me pasta.”

“Yeah… 23 hours ago.”

“Oh,” he stared down at the pot. “Huh.” Seemingly unbothered.

Matt felt his face twist. “Uhm… Shiro, that was first cooked on Monday.” Shiro reached into the mess and picked out a chunk of 3-day-old eggplant. He gave it a sniff.

“The closest thing it’s seen to a fridge, is the corner by the window.” Passing inspection, the piece went straight into Shiro’s mouth—“Like. That’s it.”—and he dug right back into the congealed crust of old sauce, hunting for more.

“And it’s been sitting out, nice and reheated, for 23 hour— _do you want a fork?_ ”

Shiro tossed a desiccated _penne rigate_ high into the air, and caught it in his mouth. “Nah, I’m good.”

It _crunched._ Matt’s stomach rolled over. The sun hadn’t even risen yet, he wanted to go back to bed.

Matt spent half their friendship thinking Shiro insane, and the other half thinking him incorrigible. Days got _very long_ when Shiro decided to be both.

 

***

 

_Your friend sounds like an idiot._

_That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?_

_…_

_Yeah, he was an idiot._

 

***

 

Matt jerked to a halt in the doorway. “What happened?”

Calmly scrubbing at a locker, Shiro offered, “Someone figured my stuff was too drab.” And he motioned at the lurid splash of color, currently dripping grungy water down towards the floor.

“The fuck’s that mean?”

Shiro smiled, like he found Matt amusing. “Well,” he braced an elbow next to the defaced door, hand raking over his head. With his other he gestured vaguely at—Matt took a step closer—a caricaturized drawing of two figures. One of whom was very clearly standing, one of whom was very clearly kneeling. In what was pretty unmistakably, an enthusiastic act of fellatio. Surrounding the images there was a liberal sprawling of various messages in jagged letters, but nothing he wanted to try to make out.

Matt’s mouth fell slightly open.

Eyes narrow, Shiro appeared unimpressed. But his words came out very clipped, and very, very fast. “Apparently, this is how I’m getting onto the _Persephone_. See?” He pointed to the kneeling figure, identifying slanted lines on the face, “They even got my eyes right.”

Matt’s flinch would be better suited to having been punched. His stomach rolled over as he pinballed between secondhand embarrassment and vicarious hurt. And a malignantly dark, slowly building outrage. At this juncture, Matt should maybe have been offering support, but he was a bit busy being disgusted.  

Why was Shiro down here, scrubbing at it, instead of upstairs, reporting it? Matt stared, while the question burnt a hole in his tongue.

“They went the extra mile, with the details. Seems kind of old-fashioned, you know? Kind of last-century?” A sharp smile, “Some people, right?”

Finally, he found his voice, “Was it Erikson or someone else?” 

“Well," Shiro’s chuckle made Matt feel like an idiot, “Considering that he and a couple others made time see me, about ten minutes before you walked in, I’m just saying  _yes._ ”

Matt was already making a grab for the hem of Shiro’s shirt. Lightning-fast, Shiro’s hand shot up to slap him away.

“The fuck?” Matt sputtered. “Hang on, do you need to get looked at?”

“Nope. I’m good.” Shiro just frowned at him for prying. “I don’t bruise easy.”

 _What?_ “You don't— Fuck, you tell Iverson yet? You… wait, you _are_ telling Iverson, right? When?”

But the more flighty Matt got, the more Shiro shut down. His lips pressed together until they disappeared into a line. Wringing out the rag in his hand, he leaned against the wall. “I didn’t, no. And don’t you tell him either.”

“Why the fuck not?” Matt was _so_ far from this line of reason.

Shiro’s look turned mulish. “Just not something he needs to hear. It’s not imp- ”

“No, it’s _plenty_ important enough.” Jesus, what was he thinking? “You can’t—”

“I can do what I want.”

“ _Wha_ \- Okay, just…” _Hang on._ Matt pulled himself down and inwards, condensing his anxieties into a glare. “I hope you’re about to tell me some very good reasoning.”

Shiro frowned right back. “Think. Of what a fuckton of trouble that would give them. You know they’d fight it, they’d—”

“They’re only  _doing it_ because they think you won’t—”

“They’d. fight it.” Insufferably even, level and rational, Shiro’s voice trampled over Matt’s interruption. “And they’d argue it, and they’d deny it. They’d drag it out into some long, protracted nightmare.”

Matt’s stomach stopped rolling and started to sink.

“And then whose name”—Shiro jerked his soggy rag up, dousing Matt with a spray of water droplets. He pointed it to the mess—“do you think would be stuck to it?”

Matt’s mouth worked to refute that, but there wasn’t any sound.

Matt loved the Garrison. He did, he loved being here. Both he and Shiro loved being here.

But.

It wasn’t as progressive a meritocracy as it might have liked to pretend. _The race doesn’t go to the swiftest._ Cronyism was a thing. Nepotism was a thing (Matt _hated_ that, but it was). Policies were updated about as often as Matt got a new sibling. Which was to say once, in all of history. A lot of things were let slide. Sometimes doors opened and shut based on _who_ you knew, not _what_ you knew.

But something like this? Matt didn’t know the whole story here, but he’d bet money that Erikson could be facing some pretty hefty repercussions if Shiro reported him. There was zero tolerance, when people brought that kind of thing forward.

But then Shiro would be the guy who got his classmate booked.

And everyone would know.

That wasn’t to say the admins would be unsympathetic (though, peers were another story, weren’t they?) Administration would be _awash_ in apologies and validation; _no one_ would vilify him.

But no one would be voting to send him to Kerberos, and that was the only bar by which Shiro measured. This would be the first thing people thought of, when they heard Shiro’s name: _Interpersonal troubles. Harassment. Disciplinary action._ They definitely wouldn’t be thinking _ideal candidate for first pilot in history to fly into the Kuiper belt._ Kerberos was too highbrow. Too important, the committee wouldn’t choose anyone with drama. No matter how small, and no matter which side of it he was on.

This could be the perfect thing to ruin Shiro’s credibility. With the committee, with _other cadets_ (because solidarity  _mattered_ in here; solidarity was sancrsact). But all of those problems went away, if the whole thing never happened. Matt couldn’t keep pretending he didn’t understand the thinking. It may have been an uglier version of it, but didn’t he take the same approach with his dad?

Don’t look at the issue. Pretend it isn’t there. Stand as far away from it as possible, don’t make it a thing. You know you’re good enough, don’t get defensive. Don’t let them stir up drama that makes you look unfit.

For Matt’s situation, it was a decent strategy. But Matt wasn’t Shiro and this wasn’t the same and suddenly Matt felt furious.

“The fuck is even the _point?_ ” he spat. Matt had bitten his tongue _so_ many times, just to spare Shiro’s feelings. Just to avoid calling him out on this idiocy he pursued. But for fuck’s sake, “What do you think you’re gaining? Kerberos? You’re not _going to Kerberos._ ”

He tossed his arms up and let them fall, “Shit, I’m probably not either.” The fuck were they kidding? “As pipedreams go, it wasn’t even a very good one.” And a pipedream didn’t deserve everything Shiro was so keen to give to it.

Turned to the floor, Shiro’s eyes went narrow. His crossed arms tensed and his shoulders ticked upward. It was a pretty clear signal to _shut up,_ but Matt didn’t much care.

It was stupid of either of them to think they’d make it. Stupid of Matt, but worse of Shiro. Bullshit, they weren’t going anywhere and Matt was _fuming._ “You put up with this, because you think it preserves some kind of chance that you _don’t even have—_ ”

“ _Alright_ ,” Shiro’s head whipped up, voice tight. “Well, if you think that and you feel strongly about it, then what are you still doing here?”

Matt wanted to hit him. “Maybe because my best friend’s a moron, and I’m just—” He sputtered, “I’m just trying— Fuck you, where the hell _else_ would I be?”

Shiro’s fist shot out and the metal locker rattled _loud._  Matt jumped, feet taking an involuntary step backwards, uncomfortably aware of how much strength Shiro carried around in that arm. But he made himself freeze, and that single step was all he gave, firmly reminding himself he hadn’t been nervous of Shiro in _years._

Shiro stood stonefaced for the seconds it took the rattle to stop echoing. His voice came out low, tightly controlled. “You know the funny thing here?” He gave his head a shake, huffing through his nose. “ _They_ seem to think I might make it. You know, they didn’t bug me in first or second year. I never even met them.” His smile looked ready to break into snarling. “They didn’t care _who_ I was, they didn’t think I’d get anywhere.” Shiro stepped forward, looming tall over Matt’s head. Reaching out, he flicked a finger against Matt’s sternum. Hard, so the spot stung. “Bit like you.”

Matt drew back, bristling. The disrespect made his teeth clench, but the truth made him ashamed. But it _wasn’t his fault._ It wasn’t Matt's fault that noname pilots just didn’t get to lead history-making assignments. It wasn’t his fault that people resented how Shiro tried anyway. Fuck, Matt was the one saying to report it! He didn’t feel guilty. He _wasn’t_ guilty, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He didn’t feel guilty, but

But he did feel like shit. Somehow… Somehow, he’d failed, here.

Shiro leaned away. “I know what I’m doing. I know _no one_ wants me doing it.” His sneer twisted dangerously “And I know I don’t have my _dad_ on selections, to get me onboard.”

Matt’s shoulders hunched up around his ears. _Well_ , so long as they were both taking hot pokers to uncomfortable truths.

“But this is what’s happening.” Finally, Shiro stepped fully out of Matt’s space. “If it bugs you, you don’t need to be here.” And then he sagged, shrinking back down to the guy Matt knew and worried for. But his voice keep its edge. “But either way, I really.  _Really_ need for you to knock that off. Okay, _I_ need you to. You don’t have to think I can make it,” and Matt had _no_ reason to be flinching, “but you can keep that to yourself.” There was something unyielding, when Shiro looked up. A promise there’d be no reasoning with him. “If I fail at this, then I can do that without your help.”

Matt got the feeling Shiro had been carrying that for some time. Long before today. And that made Matt’s jaw clench. It wasn’t like he’d been broadcasting his thoughts on the matter. Shiro heard a _fraction,_  he had no idea how much Matt bit back. Wasn’t that their deal they had going? Shiro didn’t bring up his dad, Matt didn’t bring up the reality of Shiro’s chances. That was just something they did for each other. And Matt _would_ have kept right on being quiet about it, but looking here, how the fuck could he?

Matt couldn’t deal with this. Blowing out a breath, he turned and he just left. Walked right out of the room because what the fuck was even the point? Who did he think he was kidding? Matt let the door slam shut behind him as he strode away, shoulders tight, steps heavy.

—And then stomped back in again a handful of moments later. Shiro whirled at the sound of the door, then fumbled just in time to catch the can Matt chucked right at his face.

Matt threw him two more, tossing a _whole_ lot harder than was necessary. Crossing his arms, he mumbled, “Paint thinner’s a three-hundred-year-old invention, you know.”

Shiro looked down at his armful of supplies, then back up to Matt.

Matt didn’t blink.

And Shiro’s face chipped into a smile. It was shitty, as smiles go, but it was sort of there. Startled into existence, by Matt marching back here, to pelt him with cleaners. The unspoken acceptance let Matt breathe out, unfolding his arms again. His jittery hands found his pockets instead, and he lifted his shoulders in a shrug. _Fuck you,_ where the hell else would he go?

Kneeling down, Shiro set to cracking the lid on the first can. Matt came to stand over his shoulder, offering a new rag.

“Sorry,” one said.

And the reply, “Yeah, me too. Sorry.”

Matt breathed in and out. His nose wrinkled against the smell of acetone. Speaking down to the back of Shiro’s head, he put the thought out there once more. “I don’t feel very good about this.”

“Noted.”

“You know, dealing with it quietly, is the _last_ thing—”

“I _know_.”

“These guys won’t just _learn_ —”

“Right now, I’m thinking _you_ won’t just learn.”

Well, that much was true. Matt sighed in defeat.

“Matt?” His name sounded cautious. Peering up over his shoulder, Shiro almost seemed plaintive. “I don’t need you to tell anyone. Okay? And if I don’t make the _Persephone_ anyway, you can have a good ‘I told you so.’”

“Yeah,” he muttered. He didn’t want one. At all. He wished Shiro _would_ make it, and would force _Matt_ to listen to “I told you so”s all the way out of the solar system.

And he worried. _You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped_ , yet Matt had to speak. “You know, there will be more. And they won’t all be this dumb.” He jerked his chin towards the sullied wall. “Dipshit students who fuck with your stuff,” and again, he nudged at Shiro’s middle, this time with his foot (and again, Shiro recoiled too fast). “Or who just fuck with _you_? They’ll be the least of your worries, this wasn’t a one-time thing.”

“Yup, I know.”

“Sooner or later, there’ll be _officers_. They won’t like you competing with—”

“ _Matt._ ”

Matt zipped his lip and backed off a step. He just had to say it. Just that once more.

He pulled his glasses off, wiping at the waterspots Shiro had left. Shiro’s head twisted up again, still looking suspicious. “You’re not gonna do anything.” Half-question, half-order.

Matt made a show of throwing his hands up, “The fuck can I do? My best friend’s an idiot.”

The smile was still off-kilter as Shiro held it in place anyway. “Should probably get some better friends.”

“I really should.” _But who else would put up with me?_ Matt chewed his lip in thought. “You aren’t bringing it forward, and that’s… fine.” Or at least, that was Shiro’s decision, which would apparently just have to do. Matt’s hands found his pockets again. “But we’re _not_ just going to do nothing.”

Tentatively reaching for that statement, like the olive branch it was, Shiro conceded, “S’pose not.”

“You’ve got a lot of friends.” Which was true, lots of people liked Shiro. Even his Baby Cadet mentee had started coming around. Shiro had a _wealth_ of support, provided he was willing to ask for it.

But then Matt hung a sharp left, “And you know where he sleeps, too. And hey, a soapbar doesn’t leave bruises.”

He was making a joke, but Shiro _thought_ about it. Just find the fucker and give him back his beating because why not? Blame it on hazing, write it off. Matt saw him, Shiro thought about it. Looking back at it later on, Matt wouldn’t begrudge him that. Tempers were high, and there’s always been something wonderfully simple about violence. 

But the moment passed. Shiro let out a snort, and his smile briefly turned wry, “Don’t tempt me.”

“Yeah, well,” Matt chuckled a little. “Just let me know. In the meantime,” he nodded again towards the letters, “This is juvenile shit. You know, I’m pretty good at juvenile shit.”

“We’ll… talk about it.”

Through their weak banter, Matt steadily pretended not to notice the weathered look Shiro was sporting. Matt was a gracious guy like that. He jerked his head at the door. “I mean, if you want? But let’s talk about it up on the Maz building.”

 

***

 

Shiro had a bunch of work he needed to finish. Scrubbing at Erikson’s _leavings_ had eaten into his time that evening. Once the sun went down, they climbed Mazurek, with Shiro’s work stuffed into his camelback, nestled alongside the usual water. There was a bottle stuffed in there also, but Matt didn’t recognize it.

After fifteen or so minutes, the tension had dispelled. Replaced, or at least squelched, by an escapist rush of adrenaline. Shiro climbed a bit slower at first, and Matt kept a weather eye on him. But what he’d said must have been true, he didn’t bruise easily, because the caution left his movements before too worryingly long. And apparently, he either got off on the pain or he was just emotionally feeling better because Shiro started talking. Like Matt hadn’t heard him talk before. Fast, lively, almost manic. About space, about Kerberos, about the hundreds of things he wanted to see. Matt, who had never been as much a talker as Shiro, not even at his chattiest, let it happen. He felt light. Willing and unencumbered. He supposed this was what happened after people got to unload their shit. 

They climbed the Mazurek in less than twenty minutes. But they weren’t tired, so they climbed Vaughan, too. And then they climbed the Malone, where their arms finally started to shake. And all the while, Shiro kept talking. It was like a dam had torn apart. He babbled so fast that Matt honestly didn’t catch most of it. Something something Kuiper belt. Something something ash rig, something something Venus. Something something Horsehead Nebula. One of those things was not like the others (by about 1,500 light years), but Matt didn’t have the breath to ask. And as he mantled up a window frame, Shiro was already leaping to another level and another topic. Excitement rolled off him like a contagion. Not at all on purpose, the last few floors turned into a race. No words passed between them, but Shiro started climbing faster. Then Matt did. Then Shiro, then Matt and not once did Matt fear they could fall.

Matt heaved himself up _hard,_ arms and shoulders burning. Until he could shoot his feet forward in a kong vault, and he and Shiro exploded up onto the roof. Crowing loud with splayed hands flung skyward, Matt stumbled and whirled like a top. He spun around twice before dramatically toppling onto his back, staring up at the thousands of stars. Giggling atop the Malone building with what little breath he could drag in.

 _The Malone building…_ Matt laughed harder, remembering this was the _one._ This was one Shiro couldn’t resist. That had kicked off this whole habit during first year. How strangely appropriate that seemed.

The water, along with the bottle of mystery spirit, materialized out of Shiro’s Mary Poppins camelback. And not once did Shiro quit talking about the things he wanted to do. So much for his work. And it meant that Matt wound up doing most of the drinking for both of them, but nothing abnormal there.

Shiro was knee-deep into descriptions of an engine that Ryou was working his (supposed) magic on. Doing away with the 87-TS entirely, to eke _just_ a little more speed out before it began rattling itself to pieces. And Matt just blurted it out,

“You’re one of those people, you know?” He pointed one accusatory finger, while the rest remained carefully wrapped around his bottle. “Those people who, when you die, the cause will be something like…” No, he was _not_ slurring his words, Matt was fine. “Like, you tried to fly upside down through a barn in a prop plane.”

Shiro thought for a long moment. Then he barked out a laugh, “With my secondhand lion?”

It took Matt a _long_ time to get it. Upon realizing what he’d alluded to, he sat half-upright, “Hey, I thought you fell asleep for that.” Shiro never had broken his habit of conking out halfway through movie nights (at least, before movie nights had had to taper off due to time constraints).

“Eh.” Hand flapping back and forth, Shiro offered a “Kinda? I remember… maybe two scenes?”

“Couple super-old guys? Even older lion. Cackling incidental suicide…” Matt tilted his head back and forth, considering. “Actually, if you remember the plane, I think that was the important thing.” He settled back down, oddly pleased.

Shiro’s chuckle came out light. “Maybe not a plane,” he murmured. “And maybe not a barn.” Drunkenly attentive, Matt held onto the warmth in every word. “But sure. Something in that vein. I just…”

To Matt's addled ears, Shiro’s voice sounded reverent, “don’t want to have missed anything.”

Quiet reigned for a second. Then, saluting Shiro with his bottle, Matt pointed out, “I mean, you do okay. You’ve already seen more than most.” Which was true. His family was employed internationally. Shiro and his siblings had bounced all over the globe before any of them was ten years old.

“Yeah.” All over the beautiful breadth of their little blue planet. “I’m lucky, I'm very lucky.”

And Matt had to snigger, thinking only Shiro could say something like that without sounding pretentious as all fuck. Or, if he did sound pretentious as all fuck, well, Matt certainly wasn’t alert (sober?) enough to notice.

 _Yeah_ , he decided. Shiro was one of those people. Flash-fried on Venus. Or he’d smear himself across a canyon wall on Ganymede. Who knew? Maybe it even _would_ be through a barn in a prop, right here on Earth.

As long as it was done upside-down and probably backwards, it wasn’t too far a stretch. Something fast, something loud. Ill-advised and undeniably insane. And then that would be that, that would be Shiro. And strangers would find it tragic, but the crotchety old fuckers who’d known him would get a bit of a lark. One of those people.

It begged a drowsy musing, though. Was Matt one of those people, too? Could he be?

Shiro turned, folding one arm under his head, looking away from the sky for the first time since they got up here. “You’d better be there, then.” In the dark, Matt couldn’t make out his expression. “I can’t be trusted to do crazy shit by myself.”

“Don’t you have a brother for that?” Raising an eyebrow, Matt felt muzzy at his edges.

And came the counter, “Ryou will have children and grandchildren by then. Probably a country’s worth.” Matt snorted, picturing Shiro’s brother with an army of bastards and adoptees. Terrifying.

Shiro chuckled along with him, beaming back up at the stars and seeming strangely proud. “If he called me up, I wouldn’t say no. But… he’ll have his own plans. Both of them will.”

Matt took half a second to ponder, before his hazy focus slid to something else. He counted stars, contemplating the prospect of growing old and waiting to die. And he sniggered. “If we actually live long enough to get bored and go gray? And you find yourself awash in awesome terrible ideas.” He crossed his hands behind his head,

“Then yeah, I’ll be there.”

 

 

Whether he meant it or was just talking out his ass, who could say? But it felt like he meant it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could say while looking someone in the eye, so Matt missed out on Shiro’s reaction.

But a fist reached over and gently socked him in the side, so that would do.

Him, Shiro, and a toothless old cat. “But it has to be a big enough fireball, they’ll see it from Kerberos.” That was important.

Shiro set his alarm, and there they stayed. Lazily tracing constellations. Until Matt got too drunk, and all of them shifted into lions.

 

***

 

It _was_ juvenile shit. Shiro _did_ have many friends (or more than Erikson did anyway). And soap in a sock can _easily_ leave a bruise, when swung hard at the wrong part of the body (ridiculous to think otherwise).

Those are the things with which Matt had had to content himself. Because otherwise, there was no lesson, there was no resolution. Shiro never came forward, Erikson wasn’t punished. Eventually, he just transferred out, and it was the least satisfying thing Matt ever saw in his life, but no less than Shiro had earned by not speaking.

He leaves it out of the story he remembers. When he remembers.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

“Ready to be done with this?”

Matt hops up the last stair, then slams the door behind him, walking across the roof.

Shiro smiles a greeting over his shoulder, “Little bit, yeah.”

Stepping up beside him, Matt leans against the brick security wall. He plants his elbows and lets his hands dangle over the edge. The spring breeze is still plenty bitter, but the sun is shining down like there’s a miracle coming.

Shiro's since ditched his uniform shirt and coat. He sits on the wall, soaking up the rays in a tank top. Noting the gooseflesh raised along his arms, Matt opts to hang onto his jacket.

Shiro rocks backwards and forwards, kicking his feet. “I've been ready to get out of here since Year 1.” To leave is what they want, to _just leave._ Fly past Europa, past the rim, past the last outposts. “See what’s out there.” His voice turns warm, “We aren't getting any younger, right? There's already a lot I won’t live to see. Without wasting any more time, stuck here—”

“—inside three square miles of desert,” Matt tacks on.

Shiro smiles. Sunshine-y bright and fiercely happy. And Matt won’t pretend he doesn’t see a hint of spite. Just there, crinkling the corners of Shiro’s eyes, turning a grin into a smirk. A churlish rictus of self-satisfaction, with a little _fuck you,_ folded into the edges.

Joy is a bit of savage thing, isn’t it?

Matt’s been sporting that same smile for weeks now. Walking on top of the world. It’s the look he wears, while biting back the celebratory obscenities he’d like to scream in the face of every person he passes. _Fuckers, it’s mine. Guess where I’m going_

And Shiro—who climbed his way to practically every honor the Garrison offers; who took his training at a sprint, but never burnt out; who doesn't take days off; who’s logged so many hours in the pilot’s seat that it sends dubious evaluators scrambling to double-check their records—has even more a right to it than Matt does. Shiro got this by swimming up a waterfall.

 _Going to Kerberos / (Suck it, Sunflower)—_ Matt wants to print it on a T-shirt for both of them, though that’s probably in poor taste.

“Yeah,” Matt folds his hands together, looking down. Through the sunspots dotting his vision, he sees the ground framed between his wrists. “Think I’m ready to go, too.” At the corner of his view, Shiro’s left foot sways gently. Pointed down at the dirt, far below.

It was years in the making, getting them both from down there, to up here. Years of climbing.

Shiro pats Matt on the back, hand coming down heavy between his shoulders. His fingers fist in Matt's coat, rocking him left then right.

It drags Matt out of his head and away from the ground he’s grown so sick of. As he turns, Shiro’s sunward grin is shifting. Abrasive pride and mule-headed vindication budge themselves up, to make room between them for a solemn sort of hope. It hangs like a fine-spun piece of glass, the quiet reverie of someone who knows the best is still to come.

 _Look what we did_ , Matt thinks.

 _Look where we are,_ he’ll soon be thinking.

He lets out a snort, laughing at both of them. It’s still a ways to go, they aren’t in the clear _yet._

“I’ve got a date with a moon,” he says, just to hear it. “Big plans, you know?” He rests his cheek on a fist, raking his hair from his face. The wind blows it right back over his eyes.

Shiro nods along, “Big plans.” It’s too soft a smile, he’s wearing. Matt thinks so. Too akin to something breakable, but maybe Matt can let him be.

A cloud drifts in front of the sun. Up on the roof, the breeze whistles by, and Matt huddles into his thin coat. He’s grateful for the small patch of warmth between his shoulderblades. Bare-armed beside him, Shiro isn’t even shivering.

Matt rolls his eyes. He turns again, to look down, down down to the ground.

Shiro finally pulls away, and without the weight of his hand, Matt’s back turns icey. He shudders against the bite of the wind, wondering how long he’s been this cold?

“My big plans didn’t include this.” Long arms hanging down between his knees, Shiro is shaking his head back and forth. The chill has turned his skin pale and translucent, and strange shadows hang across his face.

He looks to Matt. The soft unwelcome smile is gone.

“I didn’t plan to die for you.”

Then the ground slips from under Matt’s feet. Shiro’s hand is so freezing cold, Matt can’t breathe when Shiro shoves him hard and he’s falling

Back down, down down, it was the work of _years_

“I didn’t want to, Matt.” Ruined shards of glass, Shiro’s calm face shatters farther and farther away.

Matt.

Matt hits the ground hard enough to break his teeth from his head and every part of him fractures.

Matt.

“Matt!”

Sava’s above him, looking annoyed.

“Fuck.” Matt gulps in air. “Wha-… What?” His face aches. She’s got her fist up, ready to hit him a second time.

“You were doing it again.” Her voice is a low hiss. “You woke me up.”

Matt glues his focus on her, right on her blinking eyes. He’s too scared to look away, lest Shiro be hiding his shattered face somewhere. Just waiting for Matt to turn and see him, so Matt doesn't chance a look.

Reality hobbles its way in. He’s in the Run. The large pen, where all the workers are allowed to sleep. He’s not at the Garrison, scattered on the ground in a hundred pieces. He’s in the Run. He's in the Run with the rest of the camp. Shiro’s not here.

Shiro’s not anywhere, Shiro’s dead. Matt just had another dream.

Finally, he manages to look away. Matt sinks back down, rubbing a hand over his eyes. Ranoc aims a grumpy kick at him, for moving around so much. Matt kicks him back. The aches of various yesterdays all start settling in. He feels as sore as he did when he laid down.

Sava grunts out a laugh, “Don’t bother going back to sleep. It’s nearly time, they’re already making rounds.”

Well, that figures. Matt works up the energy to be annoyed.

Thus, begins another day.

 

***

 

Matt’s history is riddled with a hundred missed opportunities.

The times Shiro invited him climbing and he didn’t go. The times at the Garrison when Katie tried to call him and he dodged her messages because he was _so fucking busy._ The last time he missed meeting Cadet Garrett, even after they’d been talking for years. The time Keith and Shiro went into town and got their stupid pretty faces broken, because they’d been out and about, but Matt had chosen to stay at home. The times Matt had something to say, but it was too much trouble to stand up and say it.

It’s the oldest, tritest cliché in the book: missed opportunities.

But Matt wallows and mourns, like he’s the first person in history to ever have it pointed out.

He’s much skinnier than when he left the Garrison (they don’t fucking _feed them._ Every time he stops long enough to think about that, he just wants to scream, because how are they supposed to work if they aren’t fed? He wants to scream. But fuck, do you know how much _energy_ screaming takes? Just for no one to listen?)

Sometimes Matt thinks of home.

Sometimes Matt thinks of people who have never been hungry.

Sometimes he thinks of Katie, and how she used to feed Gunther table scraps she didn’t want. She never quit, even though Matt told her not to spoil his dog. Matt would eat Gunther right now, if given half an opportunity. He wonders about his dad, and if he’s hungry somewhere, too. If he could possibly be hungry like Matt is.

Sometimes he thinks of Shiro, who died before they had a chance to starve him.

Some days, Matt has the energy to think like that.

Some days, Matt has the energy to chide and hate himself, for thinking like that.

Most days, Matt barely has the energy to think at all.

Hunger is all he can focus on. He knows there was a time when he wasn’t starving. There was a time when he was an obstinate sunovabitch. He’s not that anymore.

He’s one of the workers. His muscles are whipcord, coiled around the thinnest minimum of functional strength. Matt can lift a crate that weighs more than he does (that’s a joke, see. Because he doesn’t weigh much). He can lift it, and he can set it across his shoulders. And then walk all the way up out of a mineshaft with it.

He can do that all day.

But that’s all. Ask him to do a push-up, and he’d crumple like tissue paper. Ask him to do a pull-up? Ask him to hang from a fingerjam? Ask him to reach down from a ledge, and deadlift his best friend _just_ high enough to help straining fingers grab the next handhold—

Ask him to be what he was, and Matt’s arms would probably tear out of their sockets.

Exhausted hunger. Whipcord on bone. Under a paper-thin layer of dry, sagging skin. That’s what Matt is now.

Strange how fast the world can shrink, when there’s nothing at all to feed it.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

They graduated. Suddenly, they were officers, and everything _happened._

To Shiro.

The year started and Shiro headed straight off to the belt colonies for two months. Then base camp at Mons, for two months. Then above-atmo around Venus. He was bouncing all over everywhere. Of course, for the pilot track, that was just how their interim year went. No more simulators, no more time to study (not that they didn’t still have to do it. Because they _did_ ). At this point, it was all practical. Hopping from station to station to outpost, all in the hopes of impressing the right people.

Meanwhile, Matt was stuck, spinning in a LEO. Matt wasn’t a pilot, he was an engineer. His job was the same, no matter his location. He could hone his practical skills any place, so _any place_ may as well be a low-Earth orbit.

He made the most of it. He and Ryou hung out, and they had a few good times. Ryou tried to teach him to juggle, so there was that (Matt used it as an excuse to “accidentally” pelt his work crew with hackysacks). They went into town once or twice, and they actually got home without bruises. Physical altercations were easier to avoid, since Ryou didn’t _insist_ on getting into it with every single person he met (of the Brothers Shirogane, he was by far the calmer).

But he and Matt were on different work crews, so they didn't cross paths often.

Matt also peeked in on Keith. It was on Shiro’s request, though he would still have done it anyway, just to keep an eye on him. But they weren't exactly friends. Nothing against Keith, but he and Matt didn’t have much in common, outside a mutually shared human.

Matt’s self-loathing turned backflips when he finally looked around and realized that everyone he had, he'd met through Shiro. He had two or three exceptions, one of which was Cadet Garrett (Garrison-assigned) and another of which was his _sister._ That didn’t exactly count (not to mention, he’d still technically never met the former, and the latter was _insufferable,_ ever since she broke into teenhood). Beyond that, Matt’s tenure at the Garrison had seen him manage a grand total of three romantic relationships, all of which were behind him, and none of which had lasted more than a few months ( _cadating_ again; should have known better).

With Shiro gone, the number of individuals who would put up with Matt’s… particular personality took quite the hit. And why wouldn’t it? Matt still didn’t learn, he was still argumentative, he was still contrary, and the truth was that his peers barely cracked a smile at him, for months.

Meanwhile, Shiro was gallivanting off in space. While he was dazzling his superiors around Venus, the gods of catastrophe smiled on him. To be more accurate, they frowned on the rig, _B15-7387-585_.

It was one of the worst on-site accidents they’d ever had with the rigs. Three people were injured (critically injured; one had yet to wake up). But thirty-two were not. And Shiro and a few other integral individuals walked away with medals.

It was tremendously costly. Both in lost equipment and human health. But as far as Shiro’s career went, it was the best thing that could have happened to him.

Matt got to hear about it on the news. From low-Earth orbit.

 

***

 

As luck would have it, Shiro’s next placement was a home rotation. Two months on Earth, after six spent away.

When he got in, the first person on base he went to see was Ryou. Obviously. But the second, however…

Matt was minding his own business. Hunched over at a desk, scribbling away, when he found himself in a headlock, being dragged right up out of his chair.

“Motherfucker, welcome back!”—was what he meant to yell. But Shiro was kind of cutting his air off.

Matt elbowed him in the solar plexus and slipped loose, before turning and tossing an arm around his shoulders.

The sun was dropping in the sky, as they filled a couple plates with food, and walked until they found a bench to kick back on. Matt was treated to the sight of Shiro inhaling his bowl of much missed mac ’n cheese, mentally remarking on how much he _hadn't_ missed Shiro’s table manners.

Joke was on him. Because in fact, he kind of had.

Matt ate at a more sedate pace. He asked Shiro about Venus, while pretending not to be envious.

Shiro was sparse with the details. Above the clouds, the planet was breathtaking. Under the clouds, it looked like death. The rigs crawled like giant beetles, gathering their take. Shiro talked fast; he did a lot of shrugging. And he completely skipped the part where one such beetle lost its aft and central boosters, and nearly caused a catastrophe (and for three people, there was no _nearly_ ).

In no time at all, he’d swept the subject aside and begun badgering Matt for what _he’d_ been doing all that time.

Matt set his plate on his lap and obliged. He hadn’t exactly _missed_ Shiro’s obvious attempts to divert conversation, but the change of subject gave him a chance to nerd out about a few projects. Admittedly, Shiro didn’t quite have the technical know-how to grasp most of Matt’s work (much like how Matt didn’t know _what the fuck_ most flight parameters even _meant_ ). But Matt was in the midst of explaining it anyway, when—

“Hey, make a hole. Move! Hey!”

—a diminutive bundle of Prickly shoved its way out of the crowd.

Shiro’s head popped up, and his face lit in a smile at Keith’s approach. “Hey,” his voice came out warm and pleasantly surprised. Matt found himself smiling as well.

It had taken _forever_ for Shiro and his mentee to turn from antipathic to amicable. Early on, Keith had been a pain, Matt didn’t mind saying so. Attitude as bad as the day was long. But—and Matt hadn’t exactly been keeping a diary on them, so he couldn’t point to _when_ —somehow, at some mysterious point, Shiro and Cadet Kogane had hopscotched from foot-dragging enmity, to a working relationship, and then right to _Shiro and Keith, bosom-buddies._ Keith had affixed himself to Shiro like a barnacle. And Shiro, gone all kinds of starry-eyed, had decided the younger pilot was The Future.

Keith had been in a permanent snit, ever since Shiro shipped out. He elbowed his way through the last of the people and finally made a beeline for the two on the bench. “Hey, good to have you back!”

Shiro lifted a welcoming arm, “Good to be back,” and Keith leaned into the backfist Shiro swatted against his kidney. With a brisk laugh, he turned and flopped down on the bench.

Right between Shiro and Matt.

If Matt were a man given to metaphor, that would have been the time.

 

***

 

Matt wasn’t Shiro’s jealous wife.

Or anyone’s for that matter. But it was still a bit of a drag.

Because, sad as it may sound, Matt couldn’t think of a time when he’d ever actually been anyone’s preferred go-to. How could he have been—for years, almost all of his people had also been Shiro’s. Matt hadn’t been anyone’s best friend.

He’d _had_ them. Of course he had. He’d had people who were stunningly important to him, he still did. But he wasn’t sure if he’d ever _been_ that. There had never been a person Matt could point to and say, “Yes, him. That one, I’m important to that one.”

Matt was a _difficult_ summbitch. Matt was abrasive, he was upfront, he was _loud._ He had no grasp of tact, he didn’t quit when he was ahead. He could number his flaws out on his fingers, but it all just meant that lots of people didn’t get along with him

So, he understood, he did get it.

Still a drag, though.

Keith was in the midst of complaining about one of his peers. Middle-of-the-road pilot, would probably wind up rocking it in Cargo. Super-jealous, though. Bee crawled right up his ass, and apparently, he wouldn’t leave Keith alone.

Matt had all-but-tuned out by that point. Feeling a little sulky, he wondered if he should just leave.

Shiro had smiled through Keith’s entire tirade, likely smothering laughter. “Probably sucks for him too, you know.” Matt rested his chin in his hand, noting the uninvited onset of Shiro’s Gentle Lecture Voice. “He works his ass off, for things that come naturally to you.”

Keith frowned, “You’re saying I should put up with him?”

“No. But decide already, whether he’s out of line our not. If he is, then you set him right. Or if you try, and he doesn’t listen, then bring it to your instructor, and _he’ll_ set him right. Or hell, just bring it to me and _I’ll_ do it, I’m here for a while.” Shiro leaned back against the bench, legs sprawled out for passersby to trip on. “But you aren’t going to get anywhere, if you just seethe and never say a word about it.”

Matt inhaled his mac ‘n cheese.

The hypocrisy of Shiro’s advice was _stunningly_ hilarious, and conversation ground to a halt, while Keith and Shiro watched Matt choke up pasta.

Keith frowned, like Matt had interrupted on purpose. Then he turned back to Shiro, frown seamlessly switching targets. “Why should I have to approach him? I didn’t _do_ anything.”

Shiro shrugged, cheerfully unsympathetic. “You don’t need the answer for that one.” He bumped Keith’s shoulder with his. “If you need actual help with him, people will help you. Otherwise, you either fix it or you quit complaining.”

Keith pouted. He actually pouted.

But within another two minutes, Shiro booted him off the bench with a “Suck it up, Sunflower,” and a promise that he’d be welcomed back, once he at least _tried_ to deal with his peer problem.

Matt observed the whole exchange, valiantly trying not to laugh. Hopefully, Keith was out of earshot by the time he let slip a chuckle or two (making eye contact with Shiro was a mistake).

They finished up their meal and headed back to their room. Technically, they were still roommates, for when both were dirtside. There was some good-natured bitching to be had about that. About budget cuts, officer privilege, and _tsh, what privilege is that supposed to be?_

 

_***_

 

Shiro stripped off his overshirt and pressed it to his nose. “Matt, when did I meet you?”

Matt looked up from his book. _Eh?_

Shiro decided _nah,_ and tossed the shirt away to be washed. Matt stuck a finger in his book, thinking back to their first meeting. To be honest, his archives on that one were pretty dusty. “In my brain, it was during movies?” He thought on it another minute. “No, that’s not right. I already knew you before then.”

Shiro nodded slowly. “‘While ago.”

“… Yeah.” Where was Shiro going with this?

Matt watched him unpack months’ worth of kit and extras. Anything that passed the sniff test got tossed on his bed. Anything that failed got lobbed towards the corner laundry bag. _Towards_ , because Shiro somehow missed it, every single time. Watching the pile grow, Matt let out a snort. Twenty-four hours in the future, it might annoy him, but that was a ways out.

But he watched, and the more Matt chuckled at Shiro’s methodically poor aim, the more he had to confront how much it meant to him, having Shiro back. It hadn’t been a great six months.

“I got you to come climbing pretty quick. We did that research for Montgomery—God, I was a shit back then, wasn’t I?—You gave me hell for trying at Kerberos, when there was no chance of going. Hope you aren’t sorry about that. Helped keep me sharp. And… You know, I didn’t miss the way you stuck to me like glue, after that Erikson shit the first time.” In fact, Erikson’s persistent attentions had kept Shiro skittish well into the next years. And Matt too. When the guy left, Matt’s sigh of relief had echoed right alongside Shiro’s. “And I didn’t thank you for it. Not enough, anyway.”

Matt didn’t dispute any of that. Even were it untrue, Shiro’s impromptu soliloquizing rendered Matt curiously unable to locate his tongue.

“There’s a lot I haven’t thanked you for.” Oddly gentle, Shiro plowed onward, thoughtful voice tearing up years’ worth of failed growth. “Which is weird, right? It’s just… it occurs to me, looking back,

“I think of these things. And you were there for all of them.”

Never turning around, Shiro just kept on unpacking. Folding the clothes that passed inspection, tossing those that didn’t. Missing the bag. The two of them were having half a heart-to-heart, while Matt stared at the back of his head.

Matt’s lacrimal glands took this pseudo-privacy as an excuse to start prickling. Rude of them.

But then Shiro _did_ turn, and Matt was caught red-handed and misty-eyed. “You know, I do owe you,” Shiro said, open like he thought he was just _allowed_. “I’d have burnt out years ago.”

It was on the tip of Matt’s tongue, to ask if Shiro had been replaced by an alien. Or had taken up with a guru. Matt searched for something he could say, to dam this stream of candor merrily trickling out of Shiro’s mouth. Because it was _weird, okay?_

But he bit that back. Shiro was a beautiful, charismatic motherfucker, who’d never once questioned the privilege of just saying whatever the hell he wanted. This wasn’t strange in the slightest.

It was just that Matt hadn’t known how much he’d been dying to hear it.

Shiro was a rising star, that was barely hyperbole. Matt told him he wouldn’t make Kerberos, but Shiro had been sprinting ever since. Regardless of the outcome of this mission, he’d be at the top of the list for every assignment thereafter.

Shiro was out to make himself Alpha Canis Majoris and maybe Matt had spent too long, using that to define himself. As that guy making sure Shiro never runs so fast he implodes.

Matt wasn’t _anyone's_ jealous _anything_. But—

“So, thanks.”

—while part of him was really uncomfortable, another part was just basking and drinking deep.

And _another_ part felt a keen urge to hide under his blanket. Because no, it really hadn’t been a great time around here. Matt had been _starving,_ he’d been shriveling up. With nothing worthwhile to do and no one worthwhile to be around. He was bored, even in the midst of being buried under makework, surrounded by people who made no secret of how little they thought of him. And here was Shiro. He was back and he was shinier than Matt remembered, and he was just _talking_ like this. And that damn duvet was looking mighty tempting, because Matt couldn’t remember the last time he felt so exposed.

“You’re making this weird.” That was a cowardly fucking thing to say.

Shiro tipped his head back, laughing. His hands stayed in his pockets, his shoulders stayed square. “Yeah, I know.” His posture didn’t shut down a single inch, and Matt was absurdly grateful. “Don't worry, I'll stop soon.”

 _Or, you know, you don't_ have _to_

—was what Matt didn’t say aloud.

He pondered the merits of some melodrama. Perhaps they'd reached the part in the talk where Matt burst into crocodile tears and some kind of “C'mere, you!” Or maybe this was where he's supposed to scoff and just ask Shiro if he's on the rag. Something rude, something distracting. Just to ease the pressure off, before Matt yanked him into a hug that was _bound_ to wind up too sincere to look directly at.

Shiro was wearing a smile, and Matt watched that instead of meeting his eyes. It was a quiet, comfortable little thing, worn like Shiro never had to be afraid of anyone, anywhere.

And that fit, didn't it? Shiro was never scared of anything. Not even when he was terrified.

It was a smile that made his face eminently punchable, but Matt was a pro at resisting temptation like that.

“I’ve kind of slowed you down,” landed like a rock, lobbed into the lake where Matt had been dunking his parched head.

It was water shooting straight up his nose, and he pulled back, sputtering. “Huh?”

Momentum derailed, Shiro blinked twice. Over the speedbump, his next words came out halting. “You’ve put in a shit-ton of hours. For what’s coming up on half a decade, now. And… I know it tossed a wrench in the works, every time I asked you to drop what you were doing and come scale the Maz building. Or every time you talked me down from biting off more work than I could chew. Or some idea that would have blown up in my face.” Shiro chuckled, “Or you helped me pull it off, so it didn't.”

Matt’s mouth fell open. _Stupid, I’m your friend._ Half of their idiot ideas had been his, it wasn’t like he just simpered and followed along. And as to climbing, Matt had _loved_ climbing, and he loved being able to look back and say that he'd done it. He’d never thought of it in the terms Shiro was describing. _He_ hadn't considered it time wasted.

It was on the tip of Matt’s tongue to say that. Maybe even to  _thank_ Shiro, for slowing him down, so that when he would look back on his time here, there would be something worth seeing.

“I appreciate that.”

That was the third time Shiro had said some variant of “thank you.” And Matt didn’t know what to do with it.

_I’m your friend_

—was not what he said this time either. No, he stayed mum, he couldn’t think of anything adequate. But either he really needed to grab that blanket or—

“It’s been on my mind, to mention that, once I was back in the world. You’re kind of my best friend,” and fuck, there he went again, just _saying_ stuff, like he was allowed to upend Matt’s status quo whenever he damn well pleased. Matt should have been laughing his ass off, maybe clocking Shiro in the face, but he didn’t move at all. “And just…

“Kerberos or no, I owe you a ton.”

Finally looking tentative, for probably the first time that day, Shiro pulled a hand out of his pocket and stuck it out to shake. And Matt skipped being an asshat and he skipped the crocodile tears (they hadn’t fallen _yet,_ but there was nothing fake about them).

 _For fuck’s sake—_  He was on his feet so fast he slipped and almost ate shit on the floor. He wound up needing to catch that hand instead of shake it.

Shiro had been traveling all day, so he wasn’t exactly daisy-fresh. But he was warm, and Matt had been skin-hungry for _months_. Their clasped hands pressed against Matt’s gut and his glasses dug divots into his face and there was _no dealing_ with the truckload of affirmation Shiro had just dumped on his head.

Matt pounded a hand on Shiro’s back, torn over whether he should grin and laugh or grin and cry or just hold his breath. _Wow,_ but this was a little humiliating, wasn’t it?

Still. It took him a minute to step away. When he did, his glasses were all fogged. His hastiness about wiping down the evidence earned him a laugh from Shiro, along with quick squeeze where his shoulder met his neck.

Matt hopped back onto his bed, making a point to sit _on_ that stupid blanket. Because part of him felt more like hiding than ever. And his only options were to either dive under the comforter, or to wrap himself around Shiro again. And while once was nice, twice might have just been too awkward.

Shiro remained standing, weight leaned on one leg. He dropped his head to look at the floor—“In other news”—just for a second, just a little check, before he picked it back up, smile suddenly stretching wider. “You might want to know that you’re turning heads.”

Matt forgot about the blanket.

“I’m not just saying that. People are talking about you. One thing that keeps coming up—I hear it a bunch—they like to say _‘an egghead, but not a shithead,’_ and you know what a hot commodity that is.”

That was putting mildly. Matt had heard pilots talk about engineers and other science officers, in terms that ranged from the fondest (“like herding cats on meth”), to the somewhat more vitriolic (“all this shit stuffed between their ears, and none of them _think_.”) All variations on a single theme: the abiding uselessness of bookish humans, devoid of common sense.

Pilots disliked scientists who needed babysitting. And they _really_ disliked admitting to the existence of any scientists who didn’t.

If this was a reputation Matt had managed to garner, then he had something to be happy about.

“And you should _also_ know…” Shiro bit the side of his lower lip, like he was holding back from grinning, “Look, don’t take more out of this than you should. But. I’m not really hearing any other names anymore. When Kerberos comes up—and it does—I’m hearing yours, and I’m hearing it a lot.”

Matt was catching flies again.

“It’s like everyone at least _knows_ someone who’s done work with you. They all know who you are.” Shiro loosened the ties on that grin. He raised a hand, absently knuckling the edge of it, “You… done alright, Matt. Don’t freak out early, but…”

Matt glared at him hard. “Where are you actually getting all this?” Because hearing these things—hearing that he _did it right,_ that it might pay off—was like air after drowning. Hearing them from Shiro _,_ was like water after a desert. But hearing that they were unfounded, would be like the world dropping out from under his feet.

“Officers,” Shiro put his hands back in his pockets and gave a shrug. “The ones gunning for that pilot seat, who made the shortlist. They’re all talking about this kid, who’s gonna be their engineer and field scientist.”

Less than official, but definitely more than scuttlebutt. Matt may have already been sitting, but he suddenly needed to sit down.

“Don’t break out the champagne yet. But you might just have made it.”

And Matt blurted out the first stupid thing in his head, “I-I’ve never left low-Earth orbit.”

Shiro barked a peal of laughter, “Well, maybe start packing. I think they’re just waiting to hear you complain about that.”

Grinning to be the bearer of good news, he finally returned to his unpacking. Matt was on cloud nine for the rest of the evening.

 

***

 

Well. No, actually.

Life couldn’t be _that_ painless, so the universe went and asked him to field one more thing.

Shiro had since finished emptying his bag, and parked himself at his desk with a whole bunch of reports to log. He’d been at it awhile when, “Thanks for keeping an eye on Keith, by the way,” he said without looking up.

“Hey, you asked me to.” Matt waved it off. It wasn’t a big deal.

Shiro stood up, stretching the hunch out of his back. “He seems a little calmer than last I saw. That your influence?” When he’d left, Shiro had been worried about that.

“Tsh, nah. He’s just been sullen, more than anything else.” Matt considered before going on, “There was… one time,” and the memory made him grimace a little. “He raised a bit of hell, but nothing bad enough to get him any demerits.”

Shiro's head whipped around, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “What’d he do? What over?”

Matt lifted a calming hand, to forestall the mother-henning. “Just some raised voices. No punches were thrown.” It wasn’t like Keith would _want_ to get himself booted out of here. But sadly—“They could have been, though”—he still had his stupid moments. Everything was fine, but Matt still winced as he added, “And it _did_ all happen inside earshot of a prof.”

He sighed, thinking of Keith’s _moments_. To be fair, they were rare and getting rarer. Personal insults rolled off Keith like water off a duck. Disrespect just prompted some snark, along with a smidge of extra effort, next time Keith was on the simulator (and from him, “extra effort” tended to put jaws on the floor).

From a standpoint of pure honesty, Keith (aside from being somewhat aloof with his peers) was a model cadet. He was so thoroughly unselfish that some of the only soft spots he had left were his history and— “Shouldn’t come as a huge shock. People were shit-talking you.” And they were shit-talking Matt as well. Very specifically, and in _great_ detail. And, of course, in the context of the _Persephone,_ and how Matt and Shiro might be attempting to secure their spots.

Matt looked down and picked at a loose thread that sprouted from the knee of his pants, “Dumb shit. You know.” Shrugging, he allowed, “They’re still kids.”

Kids, with whom Keith had lost patience. Matt had heard about his little altercation, and had taken two things away from it. One, a vindictive sense of satisfaction—his and Shiro’s names were tied to the _Persephone._ People were talking about it. And however long ago he'd said it, Shiro had been right, there _was_ an assbackwards sort of flattery going on, there.

And two, a touch of warm-hearted validation. Keith had been pissed off, not only on Shiro’s behalf, but Matt’s, also. Made Matt feel a little toasty inside.

Shiro, it would appear, was somewhat less toasty. His head tipped back on his neck, eyes rolling skyward, as he dropped his hands to his sides. The _clap_ of palms meeting cargo pants was as succinct a summation of years-old frustration as could be asked for. Sighing, Shiro muttered, “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“I talked to him.” Matt’s cheek was propped up on his fist, slurring the words a little. “But you’d better say something, too.”

Shiro scrunched his eyes closed and laced his fingers behind his head, looking long-suffering. He couldn’t see it, but Matt gave his most sympathetic smile.

Shiro stood like that for a minute, “Well. Yeah, that wasn’t smart,” before he let his hands slip and his shoulders slump. He turned around and collapsed backwards on his mattress, but his next words weren’t about Keith. “Matt, what do think a pilot’s job is?”

Fielding the non sequitur, Matt canted his head to the side, “… Fly?” But Shiro just twirled an impatient hand in the air. “Fly the ship? Drive like a nutsack, induce heart attacks in passengers?” More impatient hand-waving. “Chauffeur smarter people to and fro?” Matt leaned forward, “Myself, just to name one.”

He was waiting for a pillow to the face. Instead, Shiro jabbed a finger his way, not moving from his place still flat on his back. “Yes. Exactly. Get you where you’re going. Get you back.” Something in his tone was making Matt’s hair stand on end. “And do it without killing anyone. You guys are the brains. I get you there.”

Matt still hadn’t gotten that pillow, and his smile started to drain. “You okay?”

Apparently, that made Shiro lose his nerve. He pulled his hand back and crossed both arms over his stomach, contemplating the ceiling. "No, just— Yeah. Thinking… S’fine, I got it.”

“Thinking on what?”

“Just… Never mind.” Shiro shook his head. “Pilot shit. You know.”

And that was nice of him. Nice of him, to not want to dump his problems on Matt _right_ after their little… that little _thing_ they just had earlier. Still

Matt wasn’t Shiro’s mother, and he wasn’t Shiro’s therapist, and he wasn’t Shiro’s jealous anything. But— _I’m your friend—_ he was, at least in part, the guy who made sure Shiro didn’t run himself so hard he imploded.

Ergo, Matt sat up, crossing his legs and straightening his spine. “Nu-uh, what’s up?”

“I… don’t know if it’s still on the table.” Shiro caved right on the spot. Pansyass (hand to God, Matt swore he was coloring that with fondness).

But _what_ wasn’t on _what_ table? Matt settled in, to hear the whole thing. He waved an arm, beckoning impatiently, _Out with it._

Shiro looked pained. “Three people were injured. Critically injured, not bumps and scrapes. One of them, if he wakes up, is going to have to relearn to walk. _If_ he wakes up, if he's that lucky. They got hurt before we could do anything. One of them, her arm was crushed, she's missing three fingers… and that’s just because of where she was standing. A foot to the left, and she'd…” He raised his hands helplessly. “She’s safe and it’s not _anything_ to do with us, or how on the ball we were or weren’t. It’s because of where she was standing.”

The rig, then? He meant the rig?

But Matt narrowed his eyes in suspicion. Not _just_ the rig but, “Who have you been talking to?”

“I’m not sure I’m going. I’m not sure I… should.” Shiro’s voice drifted into an emotional flatline and Matt was left scrambling to catch up.

“Dude, it was your first crisis. Crap went down and you handled it. You nailed it. How is that not a good thing?”

“I handled it, I could have handled it _better_. If I’d gone straight to deck 3 instead of—”

Matt didn’t know any of the details Shiro was referencing. But he sincerely doubted he’d give a damn. “No, no, no, hang on. What, you’re worried they won’t pick you?”

“Should they?”

“ _W_ _ho_ have you been talking to?” Matt's voice ticked up into incredulity.

Shiro's remained unassuming. “No one. Just pilots.”

Just pilots. For the last several months, Shiro had been surrounded by other pilots. Established (decorated) pilots who, Matt would bet money, would never have looked at Shiro twice, except to maybe call him a kissass. Or an upstart.

They were the people Shiro had idolized, since Year 1. But Matt would _also_ bet money that they were people who’d gotten bored with their current assignments. And who _really_ wouldn’t mind being the first in history to fly to the edge of the solar system.

Matt was the hot shit little engineer that they wanted, to keep them going. But Shiro was the kid trying to leapfrog them, and _why_ was Matt feeling like he and Shiro had been here before?

There was no reason Shiro should have been listening to this. He’d never listened before, but something here had him shaken. And yes, to a _point_ , he should have been second-guessing. People got hurt, that _should_ have made him stop and think. But not suddenly decide that he was no good for Kerberos. He'd done everything right, he’d near-made himself famous.

Shiro was talking like he was already out, but his chances were so good it was mind-boggling. Matt couldn’t have _dreamed_ they’d both actually do this. 

But Matt wasn’t stupid, and he could connect dots just fine. You don’t get years of shit poured down your throat, without eventually learning the taste of it. Not even if you’re a crazy fucker like Shiro.

Said crazy fucker scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, looking defeated. “Keith’s getting himself in trouble over this, when maybe I’m not even going.”

It had taken long enough, but Matt was finally all caught up with the problem, here. “Horseshit,” he said.

Shiro had just waxed a big ball of poetry about how Matt had _been there_ for him, and how he owed him for that. By that logic, Matt figured Shiro was gonna owe him a steak dinner after this.

“Horseshit. That’s… that’s nothing. That’s people pissing down your back and calling it rain.” Matt snorted a laugh, struck by the incongruousness. “People are pissing down your back, who _wouldn’t_ piss down your throat if your lungs were on fire. They’re… not who you should be listening to, here.” Matt wanted to  _strangle_ the bastards. He would in a heartbeat, for putting this look on Shiro's face and this thought in his head.

But maybe. Maybe Matt was a little resentful that Shiro would let them do it. Jackasses came with the territory. Matt had dealt with some of his own, so where did Shiro get off, talking like he was giving up?

Matt found himself a little furious.

He hated—he’d _always_ hated—how much he cared about this. Even knowing he had a chance, that didn't make it better; he hated how much he wanted Kerberos. He hated being hungry for it. Life would have been simpler, if he didn’t want so badly to have _his_ bootprints be the first ones inside the span of the Kuiper belt. But he _did._

Matt wasn’t going after a ton of awards. He didn’t need validation from his peers. He didn’t need a cushy assignment that would set him up for a great life and comfortable career. Katie could have those things. Genius, spitfire Katie, who was going to straightshot right to everything she wanted because she’s  _so damn smart_ that…

Matt wanted _this._  Shiro did too. So, where the fuck did Shiro get off?

Matt's eyes narrowed, “You do _not_ think like that.” Shiro didn’t _get_ to think like that. Matt hopped off his bed and strode over, to drop into Shiro’s computer chair. It put Shiro inside arms’ reach, in case Matt should need to hit him. And it made him easier to glare daggers at. “You have put up with _such. shit._ to get here. That you _shouldn’t have…_ Why the hell did you do that, if you're not going?”

It infuriated him to know that Shiro could falter. That he—that the universe would even allow it. 

Shiro stared at Matt like he’d never seen him before (fair; Matt had been all but tearing up an hour ago). Truly, it was the most batshit thing, to think that they could be the ones chosen, Shiro especially. But Matt was convinced. He was converted. The color purple was going to win office, pigs would fly and probably shit gold, and Shiro was going to fly him to Kerberos.

Matt really needed to keep better watch on himself, because that was something else he hadn’t noticed over the years: his brain reclassifying this notion from _preposterous_ , to _inevitable._ Matt hadn’t realized, but he believed it.

Matt knew he wasn’t good at this. As motivational “Pull yourself together, man!” speeches go, his wouldn’t be winning any awards. But someone had to get that hangdog look off Shiro’s face, because Matt wasn’t doing this without him.

“You are the best candidate for this mission. No, _shut up_ , you are.” The beginnings of Shiro’s protest were unceremoniously stomped on. “Bar none. And that’s not me talking out my ass, either. _I’ve checked._ ” In fact, over the course of the last few months, Matt had spent _hours_ looking into different pilots as much as he was able (it had been one of many efforts to distract himself from how shitty a time he’d been having).

Gray eyes zeroed in on him with a intensity Matt found more than a little intimidating. His jaw wanted clench, he had to force his mouth to keep moving. “People got hurt on the rig. That sucks. But… Shiro, I don’t know what career path you _thought_ you were getting into, but shit can get plenty fucked in this one. If you wanted to fly a desk, you could have gone Air Force.”

Shiro cracked a token smile, but he still looked pretty damn morose.

Matt chewed the inside of his cheek. This wasn’t the time to stop and reevaluate, they were already too far in. This was when they needed to be pushing the _most_ , and Shiro had to know that. “You’re thinking about this too much.” Shiro wasn’t developing doubts because people were hurt. He’d just been swallowing shit for too long. “Sit your ass up, and here’s how it’s going to go.” And whaddya know, Shiro sat up. “You. Dazzle the brass. _Keep_ dazzling the brass. That’s your plan, you’re sticking to it. And if failure happens, well then it’s gonna hit like a truck, because you are _not_ going to prepare for it.” Matt wasn’t either. Too far in, there was only forward. The fallout would be crushing if they failed, because he didn’t have a Plan B.

“You’re going to Kerberos, that’s the only fact we care about. Me, Dad, you. The end.” Matt whacked the back of Shiro’s head; a much sharper version of the slap Shiro had given Keith only hours earlier. “Suck it up, Sunflower, you’re going.”

Shiro took the swat, looking thunderstruck.

Matt hopped up and returned to sitting cross-legged, back on his own bed. He caught Shiro’s gaze, and didn’t turn it loose until Shiro finally swallowed and jerked his head in a nod. Then Matt made a point of carefully turning away and busying himself with his own work. If it were him in Shiro's place, he’d want a minute to compose himself without being looked at (Matt smirked, once again, sitting _atop_ that blanket).

Uncharacteristically small, it drifted over from across the room, “How much of that did you mean?”

Matt was almost miffed. Without looking up he asked, “How much do you _think_ I meant?”

To be fair, giant lofty declarations weren’t exactly Matt’s norm. But— _don’t insult me—_ yes, he’d meant it. It was probably the most painful, awkward heart-share he’d ever given (without the aid of alcohol), Shiro ought to be a little more appreciative. Of _course_ Matt meant—

But then that gave him pause.

He’d meant all of it.

And as Shiro composed himself (or didn’t; in spite of every weathering influence of the Garrison, Shiro never did learn to quit being a sap), Matt had to stop. And consider that he’d had no idea, just how good it would feel to believe what he was saying.

After so long spent treading lightly, safeguarding against raised hopes. Just the simple act of telling Shiro they were going, and believing it could happen.

It was something remarkable. And it put him on a… very vindicated cloud nine, for the rest of the evening.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~Shiro, you sap~~  
>  ~~It's okay, you just never had anything to compensate for~~  
>  (Also, my predominantly sincere apologies to any airmen.)


	5. Chapter 5

  
 

Matt stumbles down the walk, with a bunch of other prisoners. A cold metal hand plants itself between his shoulders, urging him on faster.

Up ahead, he can hear screaming. Not fearful screaming, not painful. No, what he hears is a crowd. It’s the sound of people  _excited,_ it’s the first familiar noise since he got here.

Matt knows exactly what’s coming.

This morning, he and Shiro were herded one way, his dad was herded the other. And Matt had fought them, but it hadn’t done any good. The drones—the handlers, with whom Matt’s growing well acquainted—don’t  _have_ the kinds of weaknesses that humans do. Matt knows his CQC, he  _knows_  how to fight and he trusts his combatives pretty far. For fuck’s sake, the Garrison’s a funded military institution, of  _course_ they taught them how to fight…

Against other humans. Against other nations. In the event that they were ever boarded on the wrong side of Olympus Mons. In case an unfriendly country tried to creep up its holdings in the belt. Or, or-  _shit_ , Matt knows how to break a  _human’s_ arm. He knows ways to dislocate a _human’s_ shoulder. And he must be growing hysterical because how funny is this, but there  _aren’t any humans here_

Matt’s breathing picks up. He steps through a doorway, and he can see people. High above him, thousands of people. Aliens. And up ahead there’s a ring. An arena.

Is that their plan for him? That he just go out and die?

The place is hot with too many bodies, but Matt’s just been dunked in ice water. “I’m not gonna make it,” he realizes. He looks down at his empty hands.

He’s difficult by nature, and he never learns. Kerberos had been a pipedream, and he and Shiro had gone after it anyway, and they ran it down.

Only to die here? It seems like a waste.

“I’ll never see my family again.” Empty-handed, with no one ever knowing what happened to him. He can’t move. His feet cement themselves to the floor, he should have given Kerberos up years ago, when he was first told to.

_You’re not promising to come back_

Did Katie ask him that?

She did. She did, on the last day before launch.

And he didn’t. He can’t remember just  _what_ he said, but he never promised, and it’s such an absurdity, the relief that flashes through him. Whatever else, he didn’t promise he’d come back.

Then something hooks his shoulder. And without any warning he’s yanked back hard. He glimpses Shiro darting ahead, and Matt’s still reeling when someone _lights his leg on fire_

He lets out a yell, trying to curl up around it, but something forces him onto his back. It  _hurts,_  and he’s still seeing dark spots when Shiro appears above him, yelling like he’s crazed. Shiro’s eyes are… he’s gone. He’s just completely gone.

Matt would laugh aloud but he’s too scared to breathe. All this, and Shiro’s going to be what kills him. No cliff-face, no fireball, his best friend is going to murder him. It shouldn’t be happening like this. How can it be happening like this, this doesn’t even make any  _sense._

“—your father.” The pounding in his ears is all Matt can hear. And then Shiro’s dragged off him. Arms outstretched, and Matt can’t understand how he looks  _so_  devastated.

One of the other prisoners comes to Matt, kneeling by his side. Shiro is manhandled away and tossed through a door, while Matt stares.

He stares, but Shiro never turns back. There’s no salute. There’s no goodbye. Shiro tried to kill him and Matt is never going to see him again.

But he couldn’t have. Shiro couldn’t have, Matt’s brain isn’t going to accept that. He _can’t_ accept that. Denial’s the only thing that’s making sense here, so Matt holds it tight. The other prisoner is poking at his knee. Nausea rolls in his stomach, Matt can feel two different pieces broken loose, sliding around under his skin, chased by prodding fingers. It’s throbbing so bad it makes his head spin. Shiro hit him with the blunt side of the blade, and Matt knows there’s no chance of him walking on it.

“This is good,” a whisper by his ear.

How in hell is this  _good? What about this,_ at all? There are tears blurring everything, Matt can’t even make out the face next to him. But the voice turns urgent,

“When they move you, scream. When they make you walk, fall. If they tell you to stand, do not do it. Scream loudly, you’ll go with the other one. The old one, your father.”

_Your father_

_Your father_

_…_

_Take care of your father_

Matt hadn’t appreciated that bleakness could worsen. But the facts slide into place, and this time he does laugh. It spouts out through gritted teeth and flecks spit on his uniform. Shiro  _did_ say goodbye to him.

Matt is relieved. He knew it. He  _knew_ it, Shiro would never. Shiro’s always had his back.

Matt is contemptible. This is his fault. Shiro went out to die because of him. He couldn’t help his dad, he can’t even help himself.

Matt is horrified. Shiro is out there dying,  _right now._  Matt’s leg is wrecked, he might never walk again. He’s never going home again. He’ll never see his little blue planet, he’ll never see his mom, he’ll never see his sister  _ever again._

Matt is overjoyed. He’s going to live. He won’t be sent into the ring, he’s going to live.

Matt is relieved and contemptible and horrified and overjoyed and Matt just can’t anymore. Hands grab him like they grabbed Shiro. The whole world is ringing very far off. And when they hit him in the face and bark at him to hold himself up, Matt just falls.

 

***

 

Matt’s been at this camp forever.

On the first day, he hobbled into his dad’s arms, and held onto him. There was a stoop in his father’s back, already bent low. His shoulders were already thinner. Holding him had seemed like the most expensive miracle in all the universe.

But a lot of days have passed since then.

They were assigned together, and Matt _did_ take care of him. Fuck, if Matt wasn’t going to take care of him for as long as he could.

Then they weren’t. Matt tried, but his dad turned so frail, so fast, he just couldn’t keep up. Their assignments were changed, they were separated. For awhile, though they didn’t work together, they could still see each other during some meal and sleep shifts. But then Matt’s shifts were lengthened. Then, eventually his dad was moved.

Matt doesn’t see much of him, these days.

Champion disappears off the holo and never comes back. Matt quits looking for him, too.

At night, Matt sleeps between Ranoc and Sava and Desqueran. And during the day, he does his work. He doesn’t object like he once did. He’s too hungry, and he’s too tired, and he’s learned better.

Time becomes a blur, but life doesn’t stop.

Sava is one of the most horrifying creatures Matt’s ever seen. He’s a little ashamed of that, but her physicality is the first and the loudest thing he notices. Humanoid, with one limb that ends in a meaty arm and hand. But her other (this one even thicker) sprouts a pincer. Like a crab claw as long as his torso. She has too many eyes, and a mouth that’s framed with chelicerae instead of filled with teeth. She isn’t a gentle person, she hits him in the face when he makes her angry.

She’s at her angriest when he cries. She says she hates the smell he gives off. With time, he learns to cry less, and she lets him stay with her.

She’s mean enough, and she and Ranoc are both  _big_ enough, that they scare off most other prisoners. Matt doesn’t know _why_ they look out for him and Desqueran, but he certainly won’t question it.

Sava’s less talkative, but Ranoc sometimes tells stories about his home. Ranoc, in all honesty, resembles a rock made into a person, and the planet he comes from is called _Balmera._ Or rather, it is  _a_ balmera. He says it’s not a planet, but rather a species of planet-sized animal. Matt’s not too broken to find that marvelous. And Ranoc’s people are its… commensalists? Symbionts? Parasites (Ranoc cuffs him upside the head, when Matt suggests parasites)?

Most evenings, Matt is so tired he just collapses. But once or twice, he pays the tales back, with stories of his own. About idiot ideas and idiot friends, and people who never learned.

One day, the overhead interpreters fail. The field over half the camp suddenly goes down. Efficiency drops to nothing, progress grinds to a halt. The ensuing chaos is kind of hilarious, but Matt spends it running around shit-scared. He hears a cacophony, he can’t understand a single word anyone says. He doesn’t know who’s angry, who’s agitated. Where to go, who to avoid. The instant he finds him, he glues himself to Ranoc, and Matt thanks his lucky stars to be near someone safe. He’s glad it’s Ranoc, not Sava (he’s not sure he’d trust her already-short temper, given all this).

The issue is fixed faster than Matt would have expected (but then, how’s the place supposed to function if workers can’t understand each other’s instructions? It’s a priority). But Matt resolves to stick closer to his own people after that.

Another day, he spots Desqueran struggling with too heavy a load. Their four spindly arms aren’t suited to it, and they’re honestly too old to begin with. Matt watches them struggle the way his dad used to struggle, and it crosses his mind to offer help.

“Suck it up, Sunflower,” is what croaks out of his mouth instead. And Matt walks on, laughing at his own joke. Desqueran pauses their effort long enough to lob a curse at his back.

Then, that evening they pester him to know what a sunflower is. They think it sounds like something wonderful.

One morning Matt takes a fall. He’s too hungry, he’s too dizzy. His bad knee gives out and down he goes, dropping two levels. He knocks his head good, and his leg’s fucked up all over again.

And Ranoc and Sava come running. They’re beside him, faster than any foreman takes notice. Ranoc holds him down and straightens his knee out, until it snaps mostly back into place. And Sava lets Matt whimper into her shoulder while he pounds his fist on the ground until it stops hurting so much.

These become his new defining moments.

One evening, Sava gives him an entire afkana. That’s half her meal, and Matt doesn’t think he’s ever loved any single person so much as he loves her right then.

 

***

 

Matt should have tried harder to keep track of time. He did in the beginning, he knew that losing it—letting himself become untethered—that’s the first step towards cracking.

But there is no wall that’s his, there’s nowhere he can record. No dark corner where he can build a sad little mosaic of tally marks. The corners are all claimed by other (bigger) prisoners. No wall at his back, no privacy besides the illusion maintained by rigorously enforced taboo. He sleeps on the floor, in the middle of the Run, between three people who are all remains of everything he has. Tired and tiring still, Matt lives his life at the center of a herd and he is  _so. hungry._

Timekeeping just falls by the wayside. The world shrinks.

Matt remembers to think of his dad. He remembers to long for his home. But the parameters shaping his life have become work, the foreman, and the other prisoners.

And meals. Always that.

Matt loses time. That means he doesn’t know exactly how many weeks or months it’s been, when Ranoc tries to escape.

Matt should have seen it coming but he didn’t. Ranoc had been acting strangely for days. Disappearing at random times, dodging questions about where he’d been. When Matt asked Sava about it she chastised him for snooping, and slapped him so hard his ears rang.

In the morning, Matt wakes to an alarm going off. He’s yanked up to his feet, and sentries bark at him to move. They herd him out of the Run, out into the open air, then into one of the smaller holding pens. He and some others are packed in, toe to tail. And Matt’s squashed between a pair of brutes whose species he doesn’t know, but whose disposition he knows enough to avoid. Through the bars, he sees Sava, corralled in another pen with a few dozen other prisoners. A few guards keep a bead on them, while others run around like there’s a fire lit under their feet.

Then one of the outshafts explodes. No preamble, no warning, just  _oh, there’s the fire_ erupting from the mouth of it. Matt wonders what the hell is going on?

It’s chaos all morning. Lockdown doesn’t last, after somebody’s bright enough to notice just how _few_ sentries there are, guarding the entire block of prisoners.

Someone starts yelling. Two prisoners start fighting. They pull their friends into it. An entire pen dissolves into bedlam, and when the sentries come closer, to settle them down…

And then there’s a riot going on. The two giants on Matt’s either side _lunge_ ahead, and either he can help them stampede or he can let himself be trampled. There’s so much yelling, so much noise. His penmates come bellowing forward, so Matt just goes along and yells with them.

 

 

 

It’s the first he’s raised his voice against a guard, in a long time.

And that isn’t all he raises. A sentry drops its las-rifle, and he grabs it up. He isn’t a Galra or a sentry, so it won’t react to his palmprint. But it makes a decent bludgeon in the meantime. And Matt swings it at anyone who comes close enough. Galra, sentries, even other prisoners.

When there’s blood (not his) running into his eyes, he sees a ship rise into the sky, overhead. Everyone sees it, one of the small fighters, flipping around and opening fire on the camp. The whole yard turns and looks up. And they yell and they _cheer,_ because Ranoc’s in that fighter. And they keep at it, they keep on yelling. Right up until a shot takes the fighter’s wing and Ranoc goes straight down in flames.

They watch him fall.

Then they yell louder. Then they howl, and Matt howls with them.

He spends most of the day searching the chaos for his father. He doesn’t find anything. At one point, he barricades himself inside a room, along with some pieces of a sentry. He pulls its control box apart, untwines the firearm’s wiring. He doesn’t have any tools to use, so the work winds up shredding through his fingertips.

But by the end, Matt’s bloody hands are holding a functioning rifle. He heads back outside.

It doesn’t last him very long. All the weapons reset themselves periodically. And once that happens, Matt just has a club again. But he gets his worth out of it.

Dad’s not here to open doors for him.

Shiro’s not here to die for him.

But Matt gets his worth, surely enough.

The dust has settled before the day is over. Sixty-three prisoners are dead. But that’s not all that happens.

Ranoc collapsed three of the mineshafts.

The rioting destroyed forty-one sentries.

And of the mere twenty-nine Galra guards who were beaten to death, Sixteen, Nineteen, and Twenty-five belong to Matt.

 

***

 

Matt had been the only prisoner to get any of the weapons working. That does not go unnoticed.

His assignments change again. Now, at the end of the day, instead of being released with the others, he gets pulled aside, to spend half his night working his brain instead of his back.

They’ve got him drawing schematics and working equations. Like he’s their engineer, not their prisoner. He doesn’t get anything out of it. No extra privileges, no extra food, no chance to make up the lost sleep. It’s just something that they’ll have him do, until he’s no longer able to do it.

And yet, he’s grateful for the change. It almost feels like he’s betraying something, but… he finds it interesting, the work they give him. At least somewhat. He’d barely used his brain since he got here, and it’s a weird kind of nice, to stretch it out again. To _think_  again, to be building again, to do what he used to love doing. But that’s sometimes a cold comfort, when he’s tired and he’s hungry (when _isn’t_ he tired, when _isn’t_ he hungry?) And Matt thought he’d been isolated before? Now, the only time he talks with Sava, or with anyone, is first thing in the morning, before call.

Sava doesn’t talk as much anyway. Not since Ranoc didn’t make it out. She doesn’t talk much, and Matt doesn’t talk much.

But new faces appear, Matt keeps learning new names. Time’s a blur, but life doesn’t stop.

He’s kind of given up on seeing his dad again. The camp’s big but it’s not  _that_ big. His disappearance means he’s probably dead. The Galra are demanding, and everyone dries up at some point.

Desqueran is reassigned to another part of the camp; they’re just too old to keep up with the work. But they sift their long spidery fingers through Matt’s lank hair and leave him with a promise. That if they  _do_ happen to ever see his father, they’ll tell him Matt’s still alive.

Matt thanks them, and touches his forehead to theirs, with whatever smile he can manage.

But he’s unsure of how much longer he will be.

 

***

 

Only a handful of days later, he gets something of an answer.

It’s a morning.

It’s just a morning.

And it happens, faster than Matt can do anything about it.

He’s with Sava and some others. Some who are close enough to pass for friends, more or less. Matt’s gritty eyes have glued themselves to the holo. He chews his glop, mindlessly watching two fighters kill each other. He doesn’t notice when a hush falls. He doesn’t see who’s just entered.

When Matt is grabbed by the back of his neck, and yanked right up away from his meal, it comes as a surprise. Two guards, two flesh and blood Galra guards, start pulling him out of the room. Matt doesn’t know what’s happening, but he’s learned it’s just a better idea to go easy. 

Until he looks up and sees someone. A tall, thin creature, wearing a long robe and a white mask. Blank bone, watching him.

It doesn’t make any kind of sense that Matt should be filled with such dread. But he starts pulling, he starts struggling. He has to get away. Matt starts yelling. Even though he’s learned that it never works. He has to get away. It’ll only get him punished worse. But he has to, he _has to get away._

Matt hears a shriek, and one of the guards lets him go. And there’s Sava. Her huge pincer claw is clamped around the guard’s neck and she’s hissing like a cat.

More guards and more sentries appear. There’s a  _crunch_ of Sava’s pincer snapping closed. The soldier gurgles and Sava leaps to another, wrapping her thick limbs around him, to break him like a twig.

Tangling with his remaining guard, Matt sees the others climb up to their feet, and he realizes they’re helping him. They’re helping him, and that makes some part of his heart sing.

They’re helping him, and that’s going to get them killed. Matt doubles and redoubles his efforts to get loose. He’s not having anyone else die for him. He’s not losing  _anyone else—_

Navril drops. Tiny kid, Sava took a shine to her when she got here. So did Matt. Just a kid, and when she goes down, Sava lets out such a  _roar._

Matt doesn’t know why this is happening. He doesn’t know who the stranger is, he doesn’t know what it wants him for, but he’s not going. Somehow, he’s _not going._

Vego drops. Matt met him yesterday.

Escape doesn’t work. He’s learned escape doesn’t work, he  _knows_ it doesn’t.

Jeduri drops. She was almost as old as Desqueran.

The dark hood, the white mask, they try to overrun his awareness. He can barely think beyond that he  _can’t_ let himself go with this stranger, whoever it is. He’ll cue off another riot if he has to, he’s getting out of here. He’s taking Sava, and everyone left. No more people are dying. He’s taking _everyone_ , and he’s—

There’s a bright flash of light, searing his eyes before he can close them.

He hears a ringing.

When he peers his eyes open, he sees bodies on the ground. He sees Galra standing. Sentries retreating to standby. Chaos calming. And he sees people on the ground. People who understood more of strength and defiance than Matt could ever grasp. Who are  _done_ giving to the Galra. People who Matt can’t say were _his_ , but they’re on the ground, all around him.

Everyone’s on the ground. Sava’s on the ground, with a big black mark burnt into her chest.

Turning, Matt sees the creature, hand still sparking with residual energy.

Something in his chest flares hot. And Matt realizes he hasn’t learned  _anything,_ here. He starts kicking and punching everything he can reach. He starts biting, he starts thrashing. Because he never learns and he is  _done_. If he learned, he would know he can’t be doing this. He’d know that he needs to shut up, because they’ll kill him if he’s too much trouble. He has to stop.

But he hasn’t learned that and he cannot stop. He can’t quit screaming, he can’t quit fighting. He’ll never stop again, not as long as he lives. _That’s_ what he’s learned. The same as what everyone now lying dead, had already figured out.

The Galra stole him, imprisoned him. They starved him, tried to empty him out. Drain everything away, because that’s what the Galra  _do._ To every person who learns to live with giving to them.

They killed Sava.

They killed Ranoc.

They killed _Dad, they killed Shiro._

Matt’s not giving them anything else. He’s not going to die in a fireball that can be seen from Kerberos. He’s going to die right here, because he’s nothing of theirs. He doesn’t know what they want from him, or why they came here today, but they’re not getting it. He’s not building for them, he won’t give them anything else, ever again.

He flails and he bites, while the creature looks on.

Something comes flying towards his head, the light flashes white-hot, and it happens faster than he can do anything about it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What comes directly next is informed by whether the reader decides to partake of the story, [All-Pervading Corruption,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8262385/chapters/18930283) later in this series.  
> But either way, we all know there _will_ come a point in the future, when Imperial archival footage will evince Matt fleeing from his cell, into the waiting arms of anti-Galra rebels.


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

When Matt gets his Kerberos notification,  _Shiro_ is actually the one who loses his mind. An actual letter, on actual paper, appears in his actual mailslot. And Shiro has to read it for him, because Matt feels too sick to open it. He stands, watching Shiro’s eyes saccade back and forth, and it’s the worst few seconds of his entire life. He rots inside, until he hears the words, “Fuck… You got it.”

And that’s that, Matt’s brain quits processing. But Shiro reacts enough for two. “ _Fuck_ ,” he bends over double, with an arm wrapped around Matt’s waist like it’s all that’s keeping him up on his feet. “ _Sweet Jesus_ ,” while Matt just stands like a statue, stuck knee-deep in shock. Some weirdly strangled noise comes out of his throat, but he can’t do words.

Shiro’s got a hand over his mouth, muffling what sounds like “Fucking thank _fuck._ ” Then he straightens up, laughing, and Matt’s feet lift up off the ground. Shiro babbles, but Matt can’t find any eloquence at all.

He needs to be lead around by the wrist for the next few hours, while it slowly sinks in. They head into town that night, and Matt hits  _hard._  Drinks flow, at some point someone climbs on top of a table (honestly, it might be him). He wakes up the next day, between two warm bodies that he only kind of knows. Stale sex, staler sweat, and a pounding headache are the only things that convince him it’s not still some beautiful dream.

And a few weeks later, when Shiro’s notification comes in, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Matt’s the one who goes apeshit.

Once again, a paper notice. And Matt makes the offer to read it for him. But Shiro just tears the thing open, before he can lose his nerve. Matt watches him read, feeling sick again because Shiro’s competition was _so_  high. More than his. Shiro’s been swimming up a waterfall…

Before Matt’s very eyes, Shiro’s knees go out from under him and his ass hits the floor with a  _thud._

Matt’s pretty sure he feels his heart stop. Shiro probably gets a whole handful of papercuts when Matt rips the notice from his suddenly listless fingers.

And then Matt’s ears are ringing, and he claps an ineffective hand over the “Fuck!” that warbles out of his throat. And then he’s kneeling, right there on the groady-ass floor, hugging this melodramatic shithead who’s going to be his pilot.

Shiro slowly curls up into a ball with his head on his knees. He’s shaking. His mouth is moving but no sound comes out, and his face is cracked into a smile that looks almost painful.  

Matt pounds both fists between his shoulderblades, cackling, “Breathe! Breathe, you idiot! It’s happening!”

And then things start moving very fast.

 

***

 

T-minus-120 days, and Matt had no idea how much  _work_ would go into this.

T-minus-90 days, and Matt had no idea how much _glitz_ would go into this. He’s done interviews, he’s had pictures, he’s answered the same “Who has inspired you?” questions a hundred and one times.

T-minus-70 days, and he’s ready for a damn nap.

 

***

 

Matt half-wakes to the sound of shuffling feet and some girlish giggling. His foggy brain informs him that is incorrect, there can be no ladies present. And this incongruity is the only (inadequate) warning he gets, before the door swings open. The lights flick on, and in waltzes a stupendous pair of bastards.

 _F uck?_ Matt drags his head from the soft sanctuary of his pillow, and squints up, half-blind and vengeful. “Ugh, where have you b- _shssholy shit!_ ”

He scrambles up so fast he nearly falls flat on his face. Shiro and Keith half-strut, half-stumble in the brightness, and Matt is  _not_ quite awake, here because, “What the—guys, what the shit?”

 _The shit_ is dark, red blood coating Shiro’s chin, splattering his shirt. It is also Keith’s split lip and swollen jaw. It’s the leaves stuck in their hair, and  _why_ are there leaves in their hair? It’s two idiot angels grinning at him for inadequately explored reasons. “Ssshshsh,” Keith smashes one graceless finger against his mouth. Loudly, he whispers, “Hey, people are  _sleeping_.”

Shiro snorts out a giggle, and Matt stops himself from smacking his own forehead. “You  _think?_ It’s like 03:00, how did—no,  _why_ did you even sneak in here?” And why do they look like they’ve been dragged backwards through a hedge?

A hedge with fists.

They snigger at their own cunning, while Matt wonders what (the hell) they’re on?

He rifles around, until rubbing alcohol and paper towels come out from under the sink. There’s a goodish amount of blood oozing out of Shiro’s mouth. Matt notes a big patch of skin missing from his cheek.

 _That’s not… Is that road rash?_ Matt’s sleepy brain flutters around, being useless. A helplessly agitated butterfly, trying to puzzle all this out. He probes at Shiro’s cheek, attempting to be gentle. But Shiro just bats him away with a clumsy hand the size of a ham-hock. Matt’s ( _relative,_  just  _relative_ ) tininess makes it embarrassingly akin to a cat swatting a hamster.

Successfully liberated, Shiro melts down onto his bed, sagging like a bratty bag of sand. Matt’s blood pressure ticks its way upwards. He gives a huff, switching his attentions to Keith.  _Keith_ will appreciate him.

“Did  _both_ of you crash?" he tries. “Did you get in a fight?… Did you crash  _and_ get into a—Hey, you sit back up!” Matt jabs a finger in Shiro’s direction, without looking up from the goose-egg over Keith’s eye. “Don’t get blood on your bed!”

There comes an offended-sounding grunt, as Shiro levers himself up into a halfhearted slump. “Didn’t  _crash_ …”  He sounds so put out that Matt has to turn and look at it, feeling the sudden urge to laugh, himself. “But…” Slowly, Shiro’s head tilts up in contemplation. His eyes roll downward, to peer at Matt through his lower eyelashes. “Also yes.” And he’s smiling again, looking deeply serene and only maybe demented.

The grin gives Matt a view of the sizeable chunk missing from Shiro’s front tooth.

_Ah._

_Explains the blood._

Also, “You dumb  _fuck_ , what about pictures next week?”

But Shiro waves in a random direction, quite unconcerned. With a heroic will and effort, Matt puts his annoyance on the backburner, while he tries to clean up the mess of Keith’s face. But Keith and Shiro are as bad as each other, and it isn’t long before Matt gets his help swatted away again.

That’s a hell of a bump. Keith’s going to have quite a job, explaining his face to his superiors tomorrow.

Not like Shiro will, though. Iverson may just skin him alive.

A week from now, Shiro, Matt, and Matt’s dad are all getting dolled-up to have their mugshots taken (or so Matt refers to it). The shots are to be for the “official” release and announcement of the  _Persephone’s_ core crew.

Matt’s had his picture taken a couple  _hundred_ times by now, so he’s not sure why it’s necessary. Not that anyone stopped to ask him.

Matt grabs another paper towel and gets the edge wet. He glances at Shiro’s face again, and decides to just grab the entire roll of them. “You know,” and if he’s being snippy, well who’s asking? “The escort crews aren’t having their shots taken for another month. But none of  _them_ are out, breaking their faces.”

Shiro swipes the towel scrap, wadding it up in his hand before unceremoniously biting down on the whole thing. From the way he grimaces, and the way the white paper starts turning red, Matt would wager that stings a bit.

Fortunately, Matt left his sympathy in his other pants.

Or maybe it’s back in his bed, sleeping.

Good for it, he’s kind of jealous.

Shiro frowns. “‘kay.  ’ell.  ’rst o’ all, I di’in’  _c’ash_ ,” he pulls the towel away from his mouth, “for starters.” He frowns at the reddened mess and tongues at the spot where his tooth is still bleeding (and  _missing_ ).

But whatever else he’s about to offer, Matt waves it away. Plausible deniability and all.

He aims a backfist at Shiro’s head, partially because it’s deserved, mostly just because he can. It’s summarily ducked anyway. So, he douses a towel in hydrogen peroxide and slaps it right against Shiro’s cheek. The fizzing noise goes a long way towards making him feel better. As does the wince and the grimace it earns from Shiro. He squirms and tries to duck away, so Matt plants a hand on top of his head to hold him still. He winds up crackling some dried leaves to dust, and did Shiro say why those were even there?

“Feel good?” Matt asks, roughly twice as the contents of the brown bottle he’s using. “I mean, why do people bother with skin at all, right? You’re  _much_  prettier this way. It’ll be such a  _great_ face for the mission.  _Half_ a face, that is. Half a face, with a tooth missing.”

“It’ll scab over before then, they can— _hey!_ ” Finally fed up with being handled, Shiro snags Matt’s wrist, forcibly bending it away from his face. “Unnecessary roughness. Alright?”

Matt raises his free hand in surrender, backing off a step. Honestly? The less involved he is here, the better. Plausible deniability,  _plausible deniability._

When Keith finishes washing up, he moves away to give Shiro a chance. Matt waits another minute before he gets up and turns the overhead light off. The room goes dark, save for the lamp above the sink where Shiro is gingerly splashing handful after handful of water on his face.

“Keith, if you’re sticking around, you can have Shiro’s bed.” Two hours of sleep are better than none, he might as well stay. And without another word—without even taking his boots off—Keith climbs right under the covers.

Magnanimously, Matt grabs up one of his own pillows and chucks it at Shiro’s back. “You know the soft spots on the floor.”

Bent over the sink, Shiro laughs. He salutes Matt with his wad of paper towel, while pink and gray water runs down the drain. There’s a glimpse of Shiro’s reflection in the mirror and, with his face cleaner, Matt determines that it actually looks _worse,_ now.

And as far as explaining that to the higher-ups, Shiro’s on his own. Without further ado, Matt crawls into bed. He’s asleep before the last light goes off.

(They picture Shiro from the left. With his mouth closed. And an embarrassing amount of pancake makeup and later airbrushing, and his medal pinned on  _just so_. The impression they’re going for is probably something  _reliable,_  and perhaps  _understated heroic_. Matt doesn’t miss out on telling Shiro he looks like a total ponce.)

But a single week after that, Matt gets his own back.

It’s quite a day. Shiro’s late for two different interviews, he gets a drink spilled on his dress uniform, and he manages to spill his  _own_ crab rangoon on someone _else’s_ uniform (Shiro had been standing with a plate, making small talk when  _bump, stumble, smear, damnit_ ).

It isn’t Shiro’s fault, per se, but the person who tripped into him has the good sense to scamper off quick. And of particularly condemning note, Shiro’s victim happens to be one of his superiors, and the man’s next camera appearance is imminent. He’s an older guy, too. Well-decorated and so _outstandingly_ medal-laden that taking the time to change coats and navigate the pins would definitely make him late.

The stain is immortalized, seen by millions. And Shiro  _thanks God_ to not be ripped a new asshole.

And that’s all before 15:00.

To be fair, none of the day’s events is integral. Some interviews, some appearances, none of it too huge a deal. This means Matt’s free to enjoy the carnage, without panicking over the trainwreck. Which, he does enjoy it, thankyouverymuch. If there was ever a day that could afford to go tits up, this was it (and if there was ever a silly fucker who  _deserved it,_ it was Shiro).

In fact, by Matt’s estimate, the only relatively important person in attendance… is Shiro’s good-natured crab rangoon victim. Fancy that.

He’s pretty sure Shiro has an aneurysm and dies, over that fact alone.

Lucky for him, the evening events are all voluntary. So, it’s not like the  _entire_ cadre of younger cadets is present to witness the madness (Matt stops to wonder if Cadet Garrett is in the crowd somewhere, but he wouldn’t know his face anyway). Keith is definitely there, though. And upon viewing Shiro’s social death spiral, Keith appears to lose all faith in the innate goodness of life.

That day is the first and last evidence Matt’s ever seen, of cosmic karmic law. And Matt laughs himself stupid. He laughs until he cries.

 

***

 

_You were there? Jesus, right? Best thing I’ve ever seen. I think Shiro’s still shellshocked._

_But damn, too bad I missed you. We’ll get there one of these days._

_Keep up, keep well._

_-Matt_

 

_Yep. Can’t say I’m surprised at this point._

_Some friends were interested in the free food (which was awful, by the way), so we stopped in._

_And honestly, that was the craziest disaster i’ve ever seen. Ever._

_I thought pilots had all this_ **_dignity._ ** _Glad to get that band-aid torn off_ _nice and quick_

_Yeah, we’ll get there. It may take a few years, but we’ll get there. ;-)_

_So long,_

_Hunk_

 

The funny thing is, that’s the last little message Matt gets from him, before leaving for Kerberos. So, it really _will_ be years, or at least the one.

Who knows, it could be more.

 

_***_

 

T-minus-30 days, and Shiro gets a phone call.

They’re up late, going over a Kerberos walk schedule, and Matt initially pays it little mind.

But his head jerks up, when Shiro starts talking rapid-fire. His voice jumps half an octave, and he’s suddenly code-switching between Japanese and something else that Matt can’t identify.

Matt watches Shiro’s paling face, and his own stomach drops out. He holds himself still for a few moments, before starting in on the wild gestures, miming, _What? What is it?_

But Shiro barely seems to notice.

Matt feels sick. It couldn’t be about the launch, could it?

No. It can’t be the launch. If it were anything official, Shiro would be speaking English or Russian, and then Matt would _know_ what’s happening. It _cannot_ be the launch.

It can’t be.

It can’t be, but the longer Shiro talks, the closer Matt tiptoes to panic.

Upon hanging up, Shiro becomes a whirlwind. In a span of seconds, he’s already grabbing clothes and shoving them into a duffle.

Three times, Matt asks him what the hell’s going on. It isn’t until Matt lands a smack on his arm, that Shiro gives a quick, “Family stuff. Don’t worry.” He doesn't even break stride, and Matt’s brain starts cycling through possibilities, each one worse than the last.

Shiro’s halfway out the door, when Matt springs up, barking his name, “ _Shiro_.” 

And Shiro freezes mid-step, head whipping back around.

Matt takes a breath and reminds him, “Quarantine’s in less than three weeks.” It has to be said.

Shiro blinks. And swallows, jaw clenching. Then he nods once. “I know. Don’t worry.”

“Okay.” Matt jerks his head at the door. “Okay, get going.”

 

***

 

From the way Shiro rushes out, things look kind of dire. But the next day, Matt learns it was all his crackpot brother being his crackpot brother. Either through carelessness, or just lousy luck, Ryou got into an accident with one of the vehicle projects.

Shiro calls up with an out-of-breath sitrep that’s very quick and not very detailed. Ryou’s concussed. His arm is broken in three places. And he fractured his femur (Matt legit shudders at that, thinking of just  _how much_ force it takes, to make that to happen). There’s a laundry list of other, smaller things, but the important bit is that he’s awake. And apparently, he’s bitching. So, that’s good news.

Shiro’s away for over a week, leaving Matt to pick up the slack for him. For this, Shiro’s thanks is both repeated and profuse. Exceedinly profuse, in fact. If Matt had a nickel for every time he’s absolved, “Don’t worry about it / Focus on gluing Ryou back together / Dude, it’s your  _family,_ worry about one thing at a time”… well, he wouldn’t be rich, but he’d have thirty-six nickels.

It’s thirty-six times that Matt tells Shiro to focus on his family. And every time he says it, he resolves to get Katie on the phone, as soon as he can. But then Shiro hangs up, Matt finds his To-Do list is still miles long, and he’s too busy to call her.

Shiro’s calls come every other day, or multiple times in one. He’s of course doing what work he can remotely. Which, to be fair, _is_ the majority of it. That said, Matt is his mooring line. Most of the time, they talk logistics, so that Shiro can weigh in on the decisions Matt’s having to make for him. But more than once, Shiro’s voice climbs a few decibels too high, and his words start to come too fast. More than once, he tangents off the discussion and starts to freak out. And Matt can hear him bending under the weight of  _too many_ things happening all at once.

Matt doesn’t complain about the time he spends talking him back down. Shiro’s own family needs him. They can’t really afford to be supportive for both him _and_ Ryou, so Matt doesn’t mind propping him up.

(When is he going to call Katie? What is he going to say?)

It’s not a great situation. Ryou’s looking at an unpleasant recovery, complete with months of physical therapy. And Shiro isn’t going to be there for him.

Not a great situation at all. Though he’s never met the woman, Matt has nothing but the _deepest_ sympathy for Shiro’s mother. One idiot son tries to blow himself up, the other idiot son is about to launch himself off into space.

That’s the thing Matt thinks about when he’s up, doing Shiro’s work instead of sleeping. He thinks about his own mom. He thinks about if that were ever to be him and Katie.

Shiro stumbles back in at 04:00 on a Monday, red-eyed and more haggard than Matt has  _ever_ seen him. Like he hasn’t slept in years, and Matt greets him with a long hug and a neat bourbon. And a listening ear.

And Matt wonders what he’ll do with his sister.

 

***

 

Ten days, and so many things still need to get done.

But Matt’s finally begun the process of  _dealing_ with the fact that he’s leaving family behind on Earth. He’s spoken to Katie six times in the last week and a half. For what that’s worth.

But he doesn’t think it’s worth much at all.

He’s spoken with her, but not  _spoken._ Not like he needs to. He’s talked with his mom, he’s talked with his  _dog_. He’s cried on the phone with his grandparents, his cousins, his aunts and uncles. He’s reached all the way out to Europe, reassuring relatives he barely knows. Matt’s fielded the entire Holt clan’s worth of well-wishes and uncomfortably serious “We love you”s.

But he doesn’t know what to say to Katie.

Matt’s a bucket of awkward. Even with his own family. A bucket of awkward, with workaholic tendencies, who hurts people’s feelings, who pushes when he should back off. Who always digs the hole deeper (and deeper and deeper), and who never, ever, ever learns. He’s a damn mess, is what he is.

Still, he thinks he’s  _supposed_ to have something profound. Something life-affirming to tell her, before he goes.

It’s not like he plans to tragically die out on this mission, but… no human has ever gone this far. Matt  _ought_ have something to tell the little sister who (even  _he’s_ aware) has looked up to him since forever. Nowadays, she’s a bratty teenager who never misses a chance to call him an idiot. But he’s not idiot enough that he doesn’t know what he means to her.

And he’s tried, he really has tried. The last time they talked, he’d brought out every profound thing he could think of. But the words came like pulling teeth. Katie suffered through the struggle, until she eventually saved him with a magnanimous subject change.

“What did you say?” Matt asks Shiro one evening, when they’re done with work, or as done as they’re going to get tonight. Shiro’s family isn’t going to be there, on the last day. They’re all staying with Ryou, so Shiro’s already said his goodbyes.

He’s already got his loose ends all wrapped up. Irrationally, Matt’s almost little jealous (only almost, he's not _that_ much as ass).

He sits at his desk, with a glass of rum in front of him. It’s nothing heavy, but pretty soon Matt won’t be allowed to drink at all. So, he’s taking full maudlin advantage of his waning chances (admittedly, things like  _permission_ have never kept Matt from his poison in the past. But he figures this time the abstinence might actually matter).

Shiro’s lying in bed, going over schema. Minding his own business, until Matt drops his plea out into the air. 

He glances up, tilting his head in question. “What did I say to who?”

Matt sniffles, “I can’t talk to Katie,” which is a terrible, pathetic way to phrase it. Putting it like that might just prompt Shiro to respond “Suck it up,” or some other thing that obligates Matt to punch him in the face.

So, he forestalls, “You’re good at that kind of thing.” The  _talking_ thing, the  _sincerity_ thing. “What did you say to Ryou?”

Shiro stares for a moment. “Seriously?” He looks unimpressed. Matt balls his fist, just in case he’s about to need to get up.

To be fair, it’s a pretty personal question Matt’s just asked him. But Matt spent the last week, talking Shiro through half-a-dozen midnight breakdowns, because Shiro couldn’t afford to be putting that on his family.

So frankly, Shiro can throw him a bone.

Matt’s frown must say as much. Hauling himself upright, Shiro tosses the tablet aside to sit cross-legged on his bed. “Wasn’t anything particular.” Hands clasped, he rocks in place. “Told him I was glad he was okay. Gave him a hug that probably lasted longer than socially acceptable.” Matt gives the obligatory chuckle, while Shiro beats around the bush.

“And just.” Shiro drums his fingers on his crossed ankles, looking down. His voice gets a little quieter. “Said that I’m proud of him. And. Proud that I get to tell people he’s my brother.” He nods, and his voice trails off.

“That. That was it. Pretty much.” He shrugs.

But—rum clutched like a talisman in his hot little hand—Matt hangs onto every word. He’ll run out of ice at this rate.

Shiro chews on the edge of his lower lip. He looks up at Matt and shrugs again. His grin sits crooked, as usual, and far too knowing. “Just tell her what you’d tell her, if you were never going to see her again.”

 _Oh, just that?_ Matt’s chuckle is a little watery. “I feel like that should take me days.” If he isn’t careful, he’ll turn out-and-out mawkish, any second here.

Shiro laughs back. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s fair.” Rubbing his neck, he looks down. “You know, it’s…” He pauses, searching for the words, and Matt leans in like Shiro’s about to offer the keys to salvation.

But after another minute, Shiro just gives his head a shake, evidently giving up. “Told him I loved him.” He drops his hands down by his sides. “That was probably the important part.”

With that, he stands up and walks around to the back of Matt’s chair, clapping him on the shoulder. His hand sits there, warmed with understanding and steady in support because that’s just what Shiro  _does_. Matt sips his rum-water, and indulges in some quality self-loathing.

“Give her a hug. Don’t let go before she does. Tell her exactly how proud you are of what all she’s done.” Shiro ticks them off like a laundry list. “Tell her you’ll miss her. Tell her you love her.” And he cuts his free hand through the air. “There you go, I think that’s the essentials.”

Matt wonders if he looks as pathetic as he feels. “What if it’s not enough?” What if what was sufficient for Ryou, isn’t enough for Katie? What if it isn’t adequate, to explain why her dad and her brother are disappearing off into space?

Shiro heaves out a sigh, long and deep, but not impatient. “Have you had more than one of these?” He reaches down over Matt’s head, to pluck the glass out of his hands.

Matt pouts and doesn’t answer.

The glass is set aside, farther from reach. “Katie’ll be fine, you know. She’s much tougher than you are.” Shiro squeezes Matt’s shoulder. “Little sisters do tend to be.”

Matt freezes, mid-sniffle.

He can hear Shiro smiling. “Yeah. Forgot I had one, didn’t you?”

 _Oops._ Actually, yes. Yes, he had.

“Um,” he croaks out. “Shit. Right.”

In Matt’s own defense, Shiro’s second sibling isn’t affiliated with the Garrison at all. She may or may not even live in this country, and Matt only knows her as  _that third person_ in some of the pictures Shiro keeps around. Matt had automatically asked about Ryou instead.

Matt tips his heavy head forward. Well, now he just feels like kind of an ass. He gives Shiro’s hand a conciliatory pat, where it’s still resting on his shoulder. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

Shiro lets out a snort. “Thanks?” He gives Matt’s bowed head a swat, landing so gentle Matt barely feels it. “If you don’t know what to tell her, then just tell her that.”

Shiro climbs back into his bed, tossing out the last tidbits of quasi-wisdom. “If it makes you feel better,” he offers as he punches his pillow into the appropriate level of comfiness, “I already have a hundred things I wish I’d said. And I was just with them a few days ago.”

Settling down, he forgoes reclaiming his tablet, prepping to just sack out. “You’ll be able to call her, as long as we’re inside comm zone. You’ll have more chances to say whatever you miss.”

Shiro rolls over, apparently signing off for the night. But Matt sits awhile with his lamp on, pondering the reassurance. Is that all it takes? That doesn’t sound very difficult.

He gets up and pours his icemelt down the sink, getting the light, before he also turns in.

Drifting up, “But just don’t forget that hug,” comes Shiro’s closing statement.

 

***

 

Today’s the day.

Matt tries to savor the last non-Dad, non-Shiro human contact he’s going to get for the near future. He’s standing across from Katie.  _Today’s the day, today’s the day_. He’s been repeating that to himself all morning. But after  _years_ of working towards this and anticipating it and planning for it, everything around him seems surreal.

“So, what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get there?”

The knees are missing from Katie’s pants. They’ve got black stains smeared here and there. For some reason that makes Matt smile. Over them, she wears a blue and brown dress, in a weird combination of grease-monkey and girly-pretty (not that she isn’t always pretty. After all, she looks a lot like him). She’s been talking like it’s a normal day, but every now and again, she interrupts herself to give him a hug. It’s quick, and endearingly awkward, and very  _Katie._

He chuckles, “That’s assuming we even do.  And Shiro doesn’t just crash us on the way out of atmo.”

… There have got be 800 other  _better_ things Matt could have said right then.

But Katie snorts, “Well. That’s just  _asking_ for it.”

“Karma?” He quirks a brow. “Good thing you don’t believe in that.”

Katie crosses her arms, scuffing her toe in the dirt. “Yeah, well.”

_Yeah._

If only on days like today, Matt sort of believes in it too.

In the end, it’s Katie who braves the crossing of the gap. “I’ll… miss you. You know.” She’s fighting the urge to make a quip, he can tell—to keep her adolescent irreverence in check, and say something she means, “I’ll miss you a lot.”

And, to the surprise of no one, Matt suddenly finds that everything’s happening way too fast. “I’ll miss you, too,” he rocks back on his heels. “You know, chances are, we’ll be just fine.” He had flat out  _refused_ to figure out the odds, but he knows they have to be good.

Katie doesn’t crack a smile. “This,” she says. “And people who have flatlined.”

“Huh?”

And her lips purse together. “They’re some of the only non-violent things left in modern society with any kind of mortality rate. This. And trying to fix people who are already dead. And I  _know_ you haven’t looked at odds, because I  _know_ you haven’t. But I have.”

Well, that sounds grim. But Matt supposes he deserves it, after the comment about Shiro crashing them. His chuckle comes out stilted, before Katie surges forward and grabs him, arms wrapped around his neck.

Is she keeping count of these? This was her hug quota for like, the last four years.

He wraps his arms around her and squeezes. “You know. Whatever those stats are, they’re wildly, _stupidly_ conservative, right?” He lightens his tone by sheer force of will, injecting it with reassurance. “It’s just because no one’s ever done this before. We’re just going farther. Fundamentally, it’s the same as any other trip, not any more dangerous than—”

“Shut  _up_ , I know.”

It’s all so awkward it hurts (he wishes that were all that was hurting). Matt does the only thing he can do to cut the tension. He digs the hole deeper.

“Well, you know. You’ll have an extra room.  You’ll inherit my dog.  Can  _officially_ change his name to  _Bae Bae,_ like you won’t quit trying to.  And hey, you’d get to be an only child, I know plenty of younger siblings would jump on that.  But my stamp collection goes to Fritz, my bottlecaps go to Rob, that’s non-negotiable.”

Katie lets go and socks him on the arm. And voila, sadness circumvented. Matt pats himself on the back.

She steps away, with one eyebrow raised, “Who’re they supposed to be?”

“Eh. One lives under my floor, the other possesses your stuffed bear.” Matt’s told himself a dozen times this is just like a routine mission.

“I don’t have stuffed animals.”

“You threw out  _Rob?_   Gasp.” Of course, don’t people die on routine missions all the time? Yes, but isn’t that the same as saying  _people_   _die_  all the time? He doesn’t know.

Katie puts her hands in her skirt pockets, rolling her eyes at him. They crinkle at the edges. Rocking back and forth, from her heels to her toes, she shows him a grin. “You’re really fucking excited, aren’t you?”

Matt takes a second to clutch his non-existent pearls. “Language.”  But the only truth is, “I’m really, really,  _really_ fucking excited, yeah.” He’s trying not to be scared shitless, but he’s about to get into a ship and his best friend’s going to fly his ass out past goddamned Pluto and that’s some scary shit right there and he’s  _so_ fucking excited. He needs to hug his sister, he needs to hug his mother, he can’t leave but he  _needs_ to leave. He’s been starving for it, he  _needs_ to be up there.

“You aren’t promising to come back.”

Ice water.

Matt’s seen the plaque with all the names. It stands in a place of honor at the Garrison, a huge relic from the 20th and 21st centuries. But there’s still room on it. And names are still added. A name was added after the incident that got Shiro his medal (one man never woke up; Shiro still thinks of it all the time).

Nope. He is not promising his baby sister he’ll come back. Matt never, ever learns, but at least he knows better than this.

“You probably will. I know you probably will… I  _want_ you to promise, but that’s stupid.”

His mouth twitches into a smile. “I’ve heard stupider.”

He has one more thing to say. So, he spits it out super-fast, “I’m really proud of you.”

It feels a bit weird, like something Dad should be saying.

But it doesn’t feel  _that_ weird, when the truth is Matt’s so proud of her it hurts. “You’re scary-smart. Truly scary, I’m terrified all the time. And— ”  _Fuck it, just keep going,_

“And I really like the person you’re becoming.”

It’s not so hard, is it? He loves his sister, he’s proud as fuck. Shiro was right, the rest is gravy.

Oops, there goes the hug quota again.

Katie’s ponytail tickles his nose, as Matt stares down at the ground over her shoulder. The red dirt is a mess of footprints. Her sneakers, his boots. He thinks about somewhere else he’ll be seeing his boot tracks, very very soon.

“Thanks, brother.” She speaks with her face hidden in his shirt, and she lilts her words like she’s making a joke. “Love you, you dope.” Katie can only say gooey stuff like she’s making some kind of joke—it’s one of the things she and Matt have in common. And either she’ll grow out of it someday or she’ll just remain emotionally constipated…

Matt hugs his emotionally constipated little sister. Who spits nails and who’s a brat and a genius and a pain in the ass, and who hasn’t even hit her first growth-spurt yet.

He holds onto Katie, and for a second he’s terrified.

But he does not let go. He doesn’t step away, until she lets go first.

And by that time, he has his smile back on.

They make their way over to their parents, “Anyway,” Matt bumps his shoulder against hers. “I threw him under a bus earlier, but you know Shiro’ll take care of us.”

“Oh, he’d better.” Her tone is light, with steel underneath.

“You know, Ryou’s laid up. You could always hold him hostage.”

She laughs, head tipping up and tossing her ponytail over her shoulder. “See, but I like Ryou, though.” Her smile’s wide like it should be. “Still, guess I’ll keep it in mind.”

Then his parents are there. Mom cries. Dad cries. Matt cries a little bit. Even Katie gets in on it.

Then Matt turns around and grabs his stuff. And he and Dad start walking, to where Shiro’s waiting for them.

 

***

 

The odds are good enough. More than good enough.

The trip is intolerably slow, but unimaginably fast. Matt’s only ever either busy or sleeping. But his impatience makes agony out of every minute.

The last of their escort breaks off before Saturn, right on schedule.

And then, Shiro doesn’t unclench his jaw for over a month.

But then.

 

 

 

Then they’re there. 

The ship’s lights reflect on the surface, Kerberos is glowing for them.

They touch down. Matt has to keep from holding his breath, as he becomes the first human being in history, to put boots down on Pluto’s fourth moon. It’s gray. It’s icey. It’s dusty. It’s tiny. It is seven miles of the most beautiful thing Matt’s ever wanted for himself.

“Hey,” Shiro’s voice crackles gentle in his ear. “Buddy, you gonna start walking?”

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he can.

But Shiro’s there with him, like always, “ _Walk_.” 

And Matt takes his first step forward.

He’ll snap a picture of his bootprint. When they’re back inside comm range, it’s going to be the first thing he sends to Katie.

_You aren’t going. I’m probably not either._

_As pipedreams go, it wasn’t even a very good one._

But they’re here. Because they were too bullheaded to learn better. Matt went after this like he was starving for it.

It’s exciting, isn’t it? It’s exciting, and he wants to shout and turn cartwheels and then shout some more. But his steps shake. Kerberos’ gravity is barely anything, but Matt’s knees wobble beneath him. And it’s all he can do to speak above a whisper, as he marvels like an idiot. To his dad, to Shiro. Just to himself, standing there in the dark.

 

_Look what we did._

 

_Look where we are._

 

 


End file.
